Glass recycling
Because it enables consumers’ wants and needs to be satisfied, while at the same time preserving natural resources for future generations, glass recycling makes an active contribution to sustainable development. It is the only packaging material that can be 100% recycled an infinite number of times – meaning that glass possesses intrinsic qualities which make it extremely efficient from an environmental point of view.
the materials for producing
a brand-new bottle.
The use of glass cullet in Saint-Gobain's environmentally positive approach is steadily gaining ground. A raw material used by glassmakers, cullet - glass coming from selected waste collection and reintroduced into the glassmaking process - can account for up to 95% of the raw materials used for its manufacture. On average, cullet makes up 53% of the raw materials used by the Packaging Division in France.
Reasons why there can be no compromise on packaging quality
Glassmakers' qualitative demands are dictated by the process as well as by the excellence in terms of quality imposed by their customers. Glass packaging enables the product to be seen, but its prime purpose is to preserve the contents - meaning it has to be flawless. This does of course apply to recycled glass just as much as to new glass, perhaps even more. For the greater the amount of cullet is used in glass manufacture, the lower the tolerances for any impurities will be.
The ecological implications of recycling
The use of cullet in producing glass offers a number of major advantages:
- - less energy is used, since collected glass melts at a lower temperature than natural raw materials, and so can be achieved more easily and rapidly,
- - less CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere: each tonne of cullet used in the furnaces enables CO2 emissions to be reduced by around 500 kg,
- - natural resources are preserved, since the cullet is used as a substitute for the raw materials (silica sand, limestone and soda ash) used in glass production,
- - waste volume is reduced allowing as much domestic waste as possible to be recycled, reducing the amount sent to landfill sites.
The Packaging Sector's recycling policy
Saint-Gobain has made recycling one of the platforms of its environmental policy. Most Saint-Gobain Packaging Sector plants provide an outlet for domestic cullet and recycle their own production waste.
Until now, the accent has been placed on processing, a major stage in recycling, during which the glass is sorted, purified and crushed, to become clean cullet, ready to be used for making new glass. This has led to the Group investing in industrial processing and research centres dedicated to glass processing. Investments are now also being made upstream of the recycling chain (communications, awareness raising, adaptation or renewal of containers for collection, etc.) with the aim of encouraging consumers to improve their sorting quality.
