Well, England didn’t win the World Cup, but the England Supporters got through a good many bottles of beer.
In fact SABMiller, who brew most of our commercially available beers, will be producing an extra 30 million bottles during the tournament.
That’s a lot of bottles. And a lot of bottles mean a lot of glass to be recycled.
The good thing about glass is; it can be recycled indefinitely with absolutely no loss in quality. You see, when you put your used bottle in a Bottle Bank, it isn’t just rinsed and reused like a milk bottle. It could be used in all kinds of glass product.
Of course it has to be sorted first to make sure the different colours of glass are treated separately. The bottles and jars are then crushed to make “cullet” and it’s the cullet that then goes on to be fired and made into new bottles and jars.
Cullet is also used in the construction industry as aggregate – something we know all about. In fact it’s used in a material called Glasphalt which is used in the construction of roads like the M6. It comprises around 30% recycled glass and it’s reckoned that around 14 million crushed bottles were used like this for that motorway alone. But the best thing about recycling glass is that it takes so much less effort when compared to making glass from scratch.
It uses less fuel to manufacture glass from recycled cullet too so there’s less CO2 to worry about; not to mention all the other pollutants. There’s no need to quarry for new materials either which not only saves the environment, but also means we use less machinery and therefore, less fuel to collect the materials.
Best of all, if we do it right, we can create a closed recycling loop where all new items are made entirely from recycled materials. So now the party’s over, give a thought to recycling your empties.
