Glass Collection

Yes, all glass jars and bottles can all be completely recycled, with no waste parts left. Brown, green, and clear glass can easily be separated for collection. It’s then taken to a recycling facility where it’s treated and then the glass elements are fully melted down and reused to make new products.

Glass is infinitely recyclable, meaning you can reprocess and reuse it time after time without losing any of its initial quality. Use it, wash it, melt it down, create new glass, and use it again endlessly – the cycle continues. This also uses less energy compared to creating new glass from scratch, so it’s essential you recycle glass whenever possible.

You can recycle any type of glass bottle, whether it contained wine, beer, soft drinks, olive oil, or any other liquid. To recycle glass bottles:

• Empty the glass bottle and rinse it out to remove any leftover liquid.
• Remove the cork and recycle separately or compost but put any lids and caps back on.
• To recycle bottles from home visit your nearest bottle bank and place them in the relevant colour bottle bins.
• For businesses, put the empty glass bottles in the bottle bins on-site. Then arrange collection by licensed waste carriers.
• The bottle bins will be removed and taken to a recycling facility for processing.

Making glass bottles and jars always takes energy. Yet it requires far less when you recycle existing bottles and jars, instead of making them from scratch. Millions of tons of glass are recycled every year, purchased by companies to be melted and made into new glass products.

Melting existing glass can be done at a far lower temperature than you need to melt the raw materials to make new glass – which saves further energy. It’s possible to buy the raw materials required to make new glass. However, it is a more complex process for many companies to complete when compared with melting and reusing existing glass items. That’s why recycling glass makes good sense.

You can put broken glass in a recycling bin designed for glass recycling. This includes a household recycling bin where glass can be recycled domestically, a bottle bank for recycling broken glass bottles and jars, and commercial glass waste bins in businesses. As waste glass is crushed during the recycling process it’s usually fine to recycle broken glass.

Broken glass recycling should be done with care to reduce the risk of an accident or injury. If recycling broken glass at home in a mixed recycling bin you might want to put it in a cardboard box to protect the waste collectors. When recycling broken glass in a bottle bank or glass waste bin at work you can normally put it straight in.

It’s great for the environment. Estimates show it could take a million years for a glass bottle to break down. Glass bottles and jars sent to landfill take up unnecessary space, lead to wasted energy and mean these products cannot be recycled. Yet glass is one of the easiest products to recycle, thanks to its components and the ease with which it can be done.

Most glass products contain a huge percentage of recycled glass. Fortunately, it’s easy for us all to do our bit to increase that percentage still further.

Glass is made from heating sand to an extremely high temperature with ash and limestone and then shaping it. Because of the immense heat required to produce glass from sand, recycling it reduces the carbon output from the get-go. Glass can be melted down and recycled multiple times.

The glass in your windowpanes is different from that in bottles and jars, as it’s treated differently using heat and various chemicals. You can still recycle glass windowpanes though, often to make new windows or a powder for concrete and cement. Place it in a special, separate glass bin for disposal.

It will be taken to a glass recycling plant where it either follows a similar glass recycling process to bottles (melted and remoulded into new windowpanes) or is crushed and added to bulk up cement. This must be done separately to other glass types as when windowpanes are melted they release chemicals, which cause an issue for glass bottles and jars used to store food and drink.

Businesses must arrange commercial bottle collection by licensed waste carriers to get rid of old bottles from their premises legally. The old bottles should be stored in separate bins on-site depending on their materials – normally in plastic or glass bins. After the bottle collection, they’re taken to a waste management facility for recycling.

Households can dispose of plastic drinks bottles in their domestic recycling bins. You should take any glass bottles to a nearby bottle bank to recycle. Other options for old bottles include reusing plastic bottles as drinks containers, using them as measuring cups, or for storing paint brushes and art supplies.