Added: Oct 01, 2020
Last edited: Jan 23, 2025
In the EU, the proper recycling of all building glass waste could avoid 925,000 tonnes of landfilled waste every year and save around 1.23 million tonnes of primary raw materials annually. The most effective use is to turn glass into new glass products: it can be recycled in this ‘closed loop’ indefinitely. In a refurbishment project by Tishman Speyer, one of the first large-scale flat glass recycling operations in the UK was performed successfully. The UK Green Building Council used this opportunity to produce a how-to-guide for the recycling of glass facades.
Despite the fact that glass is a highly recyclable material, end-of- life building glass is almost never recycled into new glass products. 925'000 tonnes of glass are landfilled annually in the EU, and recycling of glass could save over a million tonnes of raw material. When glass is recycled, it often is downcycled into aggregates for road construction. This is better than landfilling, but represents a one-off recycling opportunity. The closed-loop recycling of facade glass into new glass is rare due to a lack of economic incentives, but also due to a lack of know-how about the closed-loop recycling of glass.
The old glass facade of the building was recycled into bottles. It could be shown that a ton of recycled glass brings savings of 1.2 tonnes of raw materials and a reduction of 250 kg CO2 in the production of new glass, as the furnaces used in production can be run at a lower heat than when glass has to be newly produced. The refurbishment project also produced important insights in the form of a report and a how-to-guide by the UKGBC, which can be used to promote glass facade recycling further.
Photo by Aleksandr Kadykov on Unsplash
