The bottle bill has been passed by a handful of states already and is working well to encourage recycling. Glass recycling in West Virginia would be greatly improved if the bottle bill was passed into law. If the bottle bill were to pass into law, the residents would then pay a 10 cent deposit on their beverage bottles, and when they returned the bottles to the supermarket or to the recycling center they would get their deposits back. The bottle bill should not be seen as a tax, and it isn’t a tax. Paying the deposit will just be an incentive to return the glass bottles for recycling. It’s as easy as that. Glass recycling in West Virginia is falling by the wayside because the majority of the glass bottles ends up littering the land or ending up in the landfills.

The citizens of West Virginia should write their congressmen asking for the bottle bill to be passed. Glass recycling in West Virginia would create jobs in the glass recycling industry, and at the same time it would reduce the litter. The West Virginia Recycling Act was mandated before 2000, and if the bottle bill were passed it would help West Virginia comply with that act. The goals are that by January 1, 2000 that 30 percent of the population would be recycling, and by January 1, 2010 that 50 percent of the population would be recycling.

Glass recycling in West Virginia would save the tax payers money in the long run because the state spends over $3 million a year cleaning up the litter. The bottle bill would be responsible for reducing the prices of groceries in the supermarket, because as it is when bottles are littered on farmland farmers have to pay to have the litter removed, because litter damages livestock and crops. Any money saved by the farmers could be passed on to the consumers. There are so many reasons to pass the bottle bill. A 10 cent bottle deposit could save the state of West Virginia millions of dollars if the two houses of legislature could agree to pass the bill where it can be signed into law by the president.

If you live in West Virginia and you are interested in helping the environment, and you want to stop waste from accumulating, please write your congressman. The best way to institute change is to take a stand and support glass recycling in West Virginia.

The Bottle Bill and Glass Recycling in West Virginia is a post from: Recycling Guide. Environmental issues have become part of everyday life read more from Pollution to Sustainable Development.

Because we are a throw away society, if we did not recycle the earth would be cluttered with used bottles and jars. The landfills would be overflowing with glass. Thanks to individuals concerned with the environment we more people thinking green and doing their part of keep their part of the environment clean. The deposit charged on your bottle of soda pop is the incentive that you will do the right thing and recycle the bottle when the beverage is gone.

Not only is recycling glass bottles the right thing to do for the environment, it also leads to profit for the city you live in. Recycling glass bottles is everyone’s job. Not only does this practice of recycling save the environment from being cluttered, but it saves the environment from being stripped of its natural resources. It takes energy to turn sand into glass. It takes much more energy to create glass from raw materials than it does to make glass from cullet. When glass is made from scratch the greenhouse gas emissions emitted from the burning of fossil fuels is astronomical. If you picture what the pollution would look like with a city full of cars, and then picture the whole nation recycling the way they should, it would be like taking 20,000 cars off the road.

When recycling glass bottles, the bottles go through a crusher which breaks the glass into small pieces, and those pieces are called cullet. Each year over $1 million is generated through the sale of cullet and glass aggregate, which is small pea sized granules of glass that has been pulverized from whole glass or glass cullet.

Recycled glass is even hitting the textile and fashion industry. From October 2007 to January 2008 the Albuquerque International Airport featured a fashion exhibit called Recycle Runway. Making fabrics from a sustainable source like glass is becoming popular. There are so many uses for recycled glass, so the next time you are recycling glass bottles you can be assured that your glass will be recycled into a sustainable product.

The Positive Impact of Recycling Glass Bottles is a post from: Recycling Guide. Environmental issues have become part of everyday life read more from Pollution to Sustainable Development.

Recycling glass is going commercial, it isn’t just the individuals who are recycling. Many bars, night clubs and restaurants are recycling glass now. Some states make it mandatory for bars and restaurants to recycle because recycling makes for a huge reduction in the trash that goes to the landfill. In Colorado Springs the Dahl Recycling Company has contracted with more than 60 restaurants and bars to sell the recycled glass to the Coors Brewing Company, the glass plant at Coors makes new beer bottles out of the recycled glass.

Bottling companies that produce bottles for beverages are much more cost efficient when they produce bottles from recycled glass. Recycling glass saves tons of natural resources from being consumed to make glass bottles. Glass is made of soda ash, sand, limestone, and other ingredients added for color. For instance chromium is added for green color, and cobalt is added for blue colored bottles. Iron is added for brown. Boron is added to make glass tempered for heat.

Recycling Glass Cullet

Why should we bother with recycling glass? We should all be concerned with recycling because making glass from recycled glass (cullet) makes the glass less expensive to produce. The savings can then be passed onto the consumer. Depending on the state you live in you can get paid to recycle your glass. You may be asked to pay a deposit on the beverages you purchase in glass bottles, but when you take those glass bottles to a recycling center you will get your deposit back as a refund. It is a win-win situation. You get paid and the bottling companies that use the recycled glass to manufacture new glass bottles saves money and natural resources.

Recycling is helpful to the environment, because for every ton of recycled glass 1.2 tons of raw materials have been preserved. Recycling saves tons of glass that would otherwise be thrown into the landfills. Glass is not actually harmful to the environment, but it isn’t biodegradable. Unless glass is recycled it will stay in the landfills forever taking up space.

To get an idea how recycling glass helps the environment you must think about the raw materials. To make glass from scratch the raw materials must be extracted from the earth. Then the raw materials must be transported to the manufacturing companies that manufacture glass. Next is the process to make glass from the raw materials, through the heating of these raw materials fossil fuels are burned and greenhouse gases are released into the environment during the melting process. Let’s not forget the electrical energy that is used to manufacture glass. The manufacturing plants must run on electrical power, and the furnaces that do the melting uses over 8611,000,000 k Watts of power per year. The cost of making glass from recycling glass cuts the expenses way down. It takes much less heat to melt recycled glass to make new glass bottles than it does to make glass from raw materials, therefore the cost of energy will be reduced to just a fraction of what the cost of heating raw materials.

Advantages of Recycling Glass is a post from: Recycling Guide. Environmental issues have become part of everyday life read more from Pollution to Sustainable Development.

Over the last few decades we have become a society that throws everything away. If we didn’t learn to change the way we think about our environment, we would one day use up the natural resources and our grandchildren’s children would live in a far different world than we do now. Recycling plastic and glass bottles is the best way to keep a healthy environment.

Recycling plastic and glass bottles has to be done separately. You need bins for your glass bottles. You’ll need a bin for your clear bottles and jars, and you’ll need bins for colored bottles. Plastic bottles have to be separated also, because of their chemical composition. Plastics are a kind of polymer, and there are different kinds of polymers. Some polymers are thermoplastic, those can be heated and reheated over and over to be shaped into a product. Their chemical composition is such that the chemical chain stays intact and can flow with the melting. Another kind of plastic is a thermoset polymer, which does not keep its shape when melted. It’s chemical composition is such that the molecules permanently lose their shape when heated.

Recycling Plastic and Glass Bottles

Plastics are categorized by number for the chemical composition. The number only identifies the class of resin used in the making of the plastic. Recycling plastic and glass bottles isn’t so hard if you know what you are doing. If you have questions about what to do and what not to do when recycling plastic and glass bottles call the Department of Public Works in your county.

It is important when recycling plastic and glass bottles to wash or rinse them out before placing them in your recycling bins. Plastic bottles that have a numbers 1 and 2 inside the chasing arrows will be picked up at your curb, if you have a municipal recycling center. These types of plastic containers are your milk and beverage containers, as well as vegetable oil and detergent containers. Other kinds of plastics, such as the plastic grocery bags can be returned to the stores where they will be recycled. As you go into the store there are large collection bins for you to deposit your old grocery bags. These kinds of plastics cannot go out to the curb to be picked up by the recycling truck. People that work in the recycling centers are responsible for recycling plastic and glass bottles. They have to sort the recyclates to make sure that plastic is not mixed in with the glass and the glass is not mixed into the plastic recyclates.

An interesting fact about recycling plastic and glass bottles is that recycled plastics don’t get made into new plastic bottles, but are made into other things like textiles and toys, while glass can be broken down into cullet and made into glass bottles over and over again, because glass does not lose any of its properties.

Interesting Facts about Recycling Plastic and Glass Bottles is a post from: Recycling Guide. Environmental issues have become part of everyday life read more from Pollution to Sustainable Development.

Because of its density and weight glass takes up a large amount of space in the landfills if we do not employ glass recycling in our everyday lives. Unfortunately many people still don’t recycle, they throw away glass bottles and jars that could go to a glass recycling plant. For every ton of glass that is recycled the environment is spared 693 pounds of carbon dioxide from being released.

Most municipalities have a glass recycling truck come around to pick up your recycled glass. Some cities don’t have the truck that comes around, but they have glass recycling stations where you can deliver your recyclables to. Not all glass is recyclable, because they have impurities in them. Some examples of impure glass would be light bulbs, window panes and glass cookware. Window panes are manufactured by mixing the glass with ceramics to make the glass strong.

There is a method to glass recycling. In order to recycle correctly we need to separate glass by colors. Clear glass is used to make jars and bottles for beverages. Clear glass needs to be separated from green glass and green glass needs to be separated form brown glass. Green glass is used to bottle wine and some beer bottles, while brown glass is used to bottle beer. It is important to keep all the different kinds of glass separated when you are recycling. When glass goes to a glass recycling plant it is crushed into small pieces so that it can be remelted to make more bottles and jars, at this point the recycled glass is called cullet.

In many states laws were passed that require consumers that purchase carbonated drinks to pay an extra five cents for each container. Being required to pay a little extra for soda pop will encourage people to bring their bottles to the recycling company where they will get their deposit back as a refund. By looking on the bottom of the beverage bottle you can see if you will get a refund for your soda bottles, because the states abbreviations are printed on the bottles.

When recycling glass for a curbside or private glass recycling company you need to recycle in containers that are provided by the companies. When you recycle glass there is always a chance the glass will get broken, so the special containers are for your safety and the safety for the glass recycling handlers.

Fine sand and quartz is used in the process of making glass, therefore, making glass from recycled glass uses less energy and doesn’t uses any natural resources. Manufacturers of recycled glass are the cleanest of glass producers.

The Advantages of Glass Recycling is a post from: Recycling Guide. Environmental issues have become part of everyday life read more from Pollution to Sustainable Development.

The glass recycling Fort Worth team checks on all recyclables, not just glass. They often find light bulbs and other non-recyclables tossed into the bins specified for glass. The clean up team for the glass recycling in Fort Worth program removes the offending items and places them in plastic bags and set the bags of trash in the residents’ yards. The bags are affixed with a note explaining why they have the trash in their yard, and they are instructed to disposed of their trash properly.

The Fort Worth recycling team checks the paper, aluminum, cardboard and plastic recyclables also. The often find pizza boxes with pieces of pizza still in them. They find plastic milk bottles with wasted milk still inside the jugs. They even find pieces of food contaminating the recycling bins. All the trash is taken out of the bins and placed in plastic bags for the residents to dispose of.

This new practice that the glass recycling Fort Worth program has implemented is a great idea, and if you are looking for ways to help in the green cause you will take measures to recycle your glass, plastics and other materials properly. Other cities will use the glass recycling in Fort Worth as a model for their own recycling program.

Glass recycling in Fort Worth saves the environment, and makes money for the city. However, if people are going to recycle, they need to learn how to do it the right way. Every day careless people throw plastic wrap, egg cartons, shoes, and even their household garbage in their glass recycling bins. The $10 fee is a great idea because it will teach people not to use the recycling bins as another trash can. By employing a team of people to monitor glass recycling in Fort Worth by checking the route before pick up they are saving the recycling center time and energy.

When people recycle improperly, and when they throw trash in the recycling bins the city of Fort Worth suffers. The city of Fort Worth has to pay the recycling contractor to haul the trash off and dispose of it. The recycling team for glass recycling in Fort Worth does an important job, because their efforts cut down on the amount of waste that is sent to the recycling center. The city therefore can make about $1 million a year by selling their recycled glass and other materials.

The Glass Recycling Fort Worth Recycling Team is a post from: Recycling Guide. Environmental issues have become part of everyday life read more from Pollution to Sustainable Development.

What is a much better solution is actually a very old idea: reusing the glass. Many older folks remember how milk bottles were once returned, sterilized and reused many times. This scheme does save a great deal of energy and is, once again, gaining momentum among consumers and recyclers alike.

While reusing milk bottles does increase the weight associated with transporting the milk, it also tends to be used with local dairies, which offsets the overall transport costs, as opposed to milk that travels hundreds, if not thousands of miles, to market.

The Case Against Recycling Glass is a post from: Recycling Guide. Environmental issues have become part of everyday life read more from Pollution to Sustainable Development.

Over the years we have become a disposable nation. Whole glass bottle recycling in the form of refilling became a thing of the past. Now we either put our bottles in the recycle bin or just threw them out in the trash. Reusing isn’t so easy now in the beverage business. In our homes we reuse instead of recycle, think about the glassware in your own home. You wouldn’t drink a glass of water and then toss the glass in the recycle bin. You wouldn’t pour yourself orange juice or a cup of coffee in the morning and then toss them out to be recycled into new glass would you? Think about the expense of buying new glassware every week when you went shopping! That would cost a bundle. We wash our glassware and reuse them, because that makes economic sense, but whole glass bottle recycling has taken on a different meaning to us now.

The cost of whole glass bottle recycling is less than making glass from scratch. In the past when beverage companies reused bottles, they just had to do is wash and sterilize the bottles for reuse. The cost of the product was really cheap in those days. Though the process is different now, recycling glass prevents glass from clogging up the landfills.

The problem with the old way of whole glass bottle recycling, in the form of reusing was that stores were no longer keen on collecting bottles, because they took up a large amount of space. Time management was another factor, the grocery store staff would have to hand the bottles to get them on the delivery trucks to go back to the bottling companies.

Now days with mass production the beverage companies like to be in control of everything concerning their product. For the consumer it would be an expense to burn the gasoline to return the bottles to the store. Another disadvantage to reusing bottles in this day and age is that this process would cut deeply into the bottle manufacturing market and put people out of work.

Whole Glass Bottle Recycling is a post from: Recycling Guide. Environmental issues have become part of everyday life read more from Pollution to Sustainable Development.

From start to finish the glass recycling process is an interesting one. It all starts with you. Yes, you are the first part of the glass recycling process, for without you the glass would not be collected in the first place. The first order of the process is the separation of the different types of glass. Most of your recycling centers that take your household glass do not take window pane glass, light bulbs and Pyrex cookware.

The reason the local centers that are contracted by the city you live in doesn’t take them is that the chemical composition of these kinds of glass are much different than the glass that they use as cullet. The Window panes and Pyrex and even car windows can be recycled, but they cannot go onto the recycling truck that makes it’s route because since all the glass has to be separated, there is just so much room on the trucks. Special recycling companies are equipped to take the glass that the local center can’t take.

Conveyor Glass Recycling Process

You should have a bin for each color of glass that you recycle. In the glass recycling process the color cannot be removed from the glass, so if green glass got mixed with red glass there would chemical and color contamination of the glass. Clear glass goes into one bin, while red goes into another, brown into another bin and so on. Before tossing your glass bottles and jars into the bins the glass should be rinsed so there will be nothing in the bottles to cause odors in your home. Washing or rinsing also makes it easier to clean the glass at the recycling center. Some people leave their recycling bins outside their home rather than inside because of space concerns. It does take space to collect the different colored glass.

Once the recycling truck has come to pick up your glass for recycling it goes to the recycling center where the glass is deposited for separation and cleaning. No matter how much effort we take in separating glass for the glass recycling process people still make mistakes and mix the colors together and throw in glass items that are not able to be recycled at the plant, so the employees of the center have to do a final separation. Sometimes the workers find household trash in with the recycled glass, so it takes time for the workers to get the glass ready to be turned into glass cullet. A big magnet is passed over the glass to get out any metal that has been mixed in with the glass.

Recycling Glass Cullet

Once the glass has been washed and separated the glass is headed to the crusher where the glass recycling process turns the bottles and jars into small pieces called cullet. The cullet is then sold to glass manufacturing companies that make new glass from cullet. Cullet is also used in the making of glass from scratch. Cullet is sold to manufacturing companies that produce concrete, and to companies that produce products for the construction and landscaping business.

The glass recycling process is one of the simplest of all the recycling processes because the glass is crushed up into a gravel like consistency and then sold to processing plants that package and sell the cullet as a product. Contractors use this glass product as filler for drainage areas. It’s sold by the truckloads to construction companies.

The Glass Recycling Process is a post from: Recycling Guide. Environmental issues have become part of everyday life read more from Pollution to Sustainable Development.

Glass bottle recycling is a big business. Recycling helps the environment, because if we did not recycle millions of tons of glass would be dumped in the landfills, and since glass is not biodegradable, it will never decompose into the raw materials it was made of. Glass bottle recycling has a part to play in making glass from scratch also. Glass is made from sand, silica, and other raw materials, however, by adding a certain amount of cullet, recycled glass, into the mix. Recycled glass added to the raw materials when making glass liquefies at a lower temperature than the raw materials. The cullet helps in the process of making glass from scratch.

Glass bottle recycling produces cullet which goes into glass containers and many other products. Cullet is valuable in the making of new glass because it contains silica, soda and lime. When making new glass the cullet is rich in silica, soda and lime, so that less raw materials have to be used to make new glass. Glass cullet can be ground down to be granular, and it is used in construction, cullet is used as an additive to concrete. Cullet added to concrete is called aggregate and it is used in roadway construction, and in bedding and backfill. Cullet is also used in sandblasting, and for backfill for underground storage tanks.

Glass Bottle Recycling

Cullet from glass bottle recycling is used even in the landscaping business. Many of the lawn ornaments are made from cullet. Landscape architects use glass aggregate from glass bottle recycling to make multicolored glass gravel that resembles pea gravel. Cullet used in this way is very inexpensive to use as filler and drainage systems. Glass cullet is also used in the formation of plastic timber, because it makes the plastic maintenance free and virtually indestructible. Plastic timber made with glass cullet can be used to build decks, it can be used inside the home and outside. Cullet is used to make some tiles that are used in the home.

Recycling Glass Cullet

Glass Bottle Recycling and Plastic Recycling

The difference between glass bottle recycling and plastic recycling is that glass never wears out. Glass can be recycled over and over again without losing any of its properties, where plastics tend to get stiff after a few times of being recycled. Glass also preserves the contents inside without chemical reactions happening between the plastic bottle and its contents. Glass does not lose any of its properties, so therefore the contents will not be contaminated.

If you are looking for ways to go green, glass bottle recycling is the prudent thing to do. Not only are you helping the environment, but you will be providing the materials that go into other products. You never will know if the glass bottles you recycled will end up in the manufacture of construction materials or used in the products you buy for your home and yard. The more recycled materials used in construction and in products the more sustainable we become by preserving the environment.

The glass bottle recycling market produces enormous volumes of industrial waste materials containing various organic components including greases.  Practically all waste glass can be used in concrete applications, which includes glass that’s unsuitable for uses including glass bottle recycling.

Glass Bottle Recycling and Uses for Cullet is a post from: Recycling Guide. Environmental issues have become part of everyday life read more from Pollution to Sustainable Development.