Recycling breaks the (bottle) bank

Donal Hickey on the huge amount of glass being returned

LONG before bottle banks were invented, Irish people were recycling glass. Many of us will remember collecting jam jars for which we received one old penny, a princely sum for a youngster, while milk bottles have always been returned.

Maybe it’s because Irish people have been reusing glass since God knows when, but it’s an area in which great success has been achieved. The amount of glass being returned for reuse is just mind-boggling.

Corkonians are the country’s best glass recyclers, with deposits of 74 bottles for every man, woman and child in the county. Galway and Leitrim were the next best with an average of 64 and 63 items per person respectively, according to Repak during Glass Recycling Week.

This form of recycling is something Irish people generally have taken to enthusiastically, as is evidenced by the multiplicity and use of thousands of bottle banks across the country, even in small villages.

A record 46,000 tonnes of glass has been recycled by Rehab Recycle in the first eight months of the year — enough bottles and jars to fill Croke Park to a height of 41ft.

A survey by Rehab Recycle has revealed that 149,500,000 bottles and jars were deposited in the country’s bring banks — enough bottles to stretch to 44,659 km — during the period.

Ireland’s glass recycling continues to go from strength to strength and is one of the star performers in the field. But the overall recycling target has increased this year to 750,000 tonnes, up 100,000 on last year.

“This is a large leap and we need everybody to recycle more packaging than before,” says Repak chief executive Andrew Hetherington.

“The results of the survey clearly show the great efforts of Irish people to recycle. However, we need to continue our efforts and encourage people to bring their glass to recycling banks where it is separated at source, thereby minimising contamination from other types of glass and recyclables.”

The biggest increase in glass recycling was in Mayo once again, up by 22% to 1,802 tonnes of glass, followed by Leitrim, where figures rose 19% compared with the same period last year.

The title of Ireland’s busiest bring site was won by Superquinn, Knocklyon, Dublin, which just edged out Superquinn, of Lucan, with 274 tonnes of glass deposited, representing 900,000 bottles and jars.

Glass can lasts for thousands of years and some people believe it never decomposes. Archaeologists are still finding glass from Roman times.

One recycled glass bottle saves enough energy to power a computer for 25 minutes. Nearly three million gallons of fuel are saved each year in Ireland purely through the recycling of glass.

The glass recycling process is a closed loop system, creating no additional waste or by-products.

If all the glass collected in just one year was laid end to end, it would stretch for a distance of more than 67,000km. It would take 3,200 42ft lorries to transport all the glass collected annually — a 33-mile queue of lorries.

Clear as crystal

* The typical glass container is made up of as much as 70% recycled glass.

* It is estimated that 80% of recycled glass will end up as new glass containers.

* Unlike other substances such as paper, glass can be recycled infinitely without any loss of purity or quality.

* To create new glass, substances such as sand must be heated to 2,600 degrees fahrenheit, which consumes energy and creates pollution from factories.

* Recycled glass first becomes cullet (crushed glass), which uses 40% less energy than making glass from new products because it melts at a lower temperature than raw ingredients.

* A glass bottle can take up to one million years to break down, which is how long it will sit in a landfill and take up space if it is not recycled.

* A recycled glass container can go from recycling bin to store shelf in as few as 30 days.

* Because glass is made from naturally occurring materials such as sand, it has a low rate of chemical interaction with the contents of the container, which makes it a safe packaging material over time.

* Recycled glass can be used in numerous areas, such as creating sports turf, manufacturing kitchen tiles and providing sand to depleted beaches.