IPAQ - Recyclage du verre - Une nécessité locale, un enjeu planétaire

Glass recycling has become a reality over a few years.

Environmental legislation and the “Zero waste in landfills” project make glass recycling a local necessity. The need for energy and exhaustible raw materials savings make it a global
scale stake.

A 100% recyclable material…
to infinity

A material called “recyclable” can be transformed once used into another new raw material. This is the specificity of glass which is perfectly recycled, with no lose of quantity nor quality, to infinity.
Today, any new made bottle contains more than 50% of collected glass which is the result of the processing of glass packaging into a recycled raw material: cullet. The glass industry melt up to 80% cullet in their glass furnaces.

Recycled glass as a sustainable product : 12 million tons oil equivalent (TOE) saved over 30 years.

Recycling first means protecting the environment. You need 562 pounds of raw materials to make 1 ton of glass. Those materials are exhaustible and their unlimited quarrying is a threat for the ecological balance.
That is why glass recycling is so important. In 2007, 2 100 000 tons of container glass were collected from private households in order to be recycled.
More than just a fashionable act, sorting container glass is a civic act which is based on the will to preserve the environment (it saves waste and raw materials) and the will to save energy (it saves energy to make glass with cullet).