Glass recycling is a smart way to save the planet! Let’s discover five fascinating glass recycling facts for kids.
Glass is a renewable resource meaning that it can be recycled over and over again forever. The glass that is taken to recycling plants can be melted down and made into new glass which is just as strong and useful. But a lot of glass isn’t recycled. In the UK they send 14 million bottles and jars made from glass to landfill every single day. That’s a lot of wasted glass!
We can help this by reusing glass jars for storage or making sure that it goes to a recycling plant by separating our waste at home.
New glass bottles being created means the use of transport, which releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and large amounts of water for the cooling and shaping of a new glass bottle, contributing to water waste. If we use a recycled glass bottle we create 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution and a reused or recycled bottle is just as good. The energy saved when glass is recycled is so strong it could power a fluorescent bulb for 20 hours. That’s a lot of saved energy!
Landfill is a way of storing waste in large sites or holes in the ground where that waste breaks down. Landfills are harmful to the planet as they release greenhouse gases and harmful water waste into the environment. When glass goes to landfill it does not decompose and reduce in size, it only gets smaller by being eroded or broken. Glass can break down in soil or water over 4000 years but in landfill it could take a million years.
The process of bringing in a used bottle, cleaning or reforming it into a new bottle or jar and having it sent back out again for use is a very short one. If you place a used bottle into a recycling bin it is taken to a recycling plant to be made into a new glass bottle or jar. That same bottle or jar could be back on the shelves of shops in just 30 days.
Glass that is used by companies and brands have specific colour requirements, so the many colours of glass cannot be mixed when they are melted into new glass. The main colours of glass are clear, brown, blue, and green. Why not help your parents sort out your glass recycling to make it super easy to recycle your glass effectively and help protect the planet.
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about glass recycling as much as we loved teaching you about it. Now that you know how important the environment is to our planet Earth, you can move on to learn more about our environmental topics like: Recycling, Recycling Metals and Plastic Recycling.
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