Rebecca Hartwell and Dr Mauro Overend from the University of Cambridge (UK) published a comprehensive paper on the reuse of glass from building facades which was posted on the specialist site Glassonweb.com.
This paper presents the methodology, the evaluation of the results and the potential environmental savings according to scenarios of glass recovery on the facades of buildings.
The observation is quite simple: no real recycling!
Glass is a recyclable material (theoretically infinitely) but when it is placed on the facade it is never recycled in the form of new glass; at best, it is mixed to serve as an aggregate; at worst it is buried. In 2007, it was found that 57% of the 5.1 Mt of waste generated by the EU flat glass industry was recycled, including pre and post consumer glass.
So why is the glass industry moving so far away from the EU's environmental agenda?
According to our researchers, manufacturers have focused on the function required of the glass. They have continuously improved thermal and acoustic efficiency when used as a facade. To do this, these systems consist of more materials, coatings, interleaves, special additives and adhesive sealants that make recycling difficult.
The EU's environmental agenda for action aims to move towards a fully circular economy in which industry moves towards manufacturing models, aimed at minimizing the depletion of the world's natural resources and addressing disposal issues waste in a way that materials are reused or recycled in their best form to reduce their environmental impact by 2050.
In short, we must seek a compromise in the product life cycle or new ways to guarantee the functionality required of the glass and allow its reuse at the end of its life.
What scenarios and what constraints?
Two recycling scenarios are studied by our researchers:
- reuse of materials as new components after dismantling
- the reuse of dismantled glass panels on new buildings
According to the method of our researchers, the percentage of glass reuse would be 89% in the first case and 97% in the second, which must be put into perspective with the current zero percentage in Europe.
Unfortunately these figures will only be accessible if some technical constraints are lifted. For adhesives, there is currently no generally accepted solution for removing structurally bonded joints. For laminated glass, there are no fully established delamination technologies in the EU that can effectively separate large glass panels from PVB.
What potential in Europe?
Double layered glazing (DGU) would only represent 12% of insulating glass surfaces installed in Europe - 2% for triple glazing (TGU); this indicates that there is a real potential for recycling under the new regulations.
Our hopes at FITTliner
Throwing 86% of Europe's stock of insulating glass in landfill or turning it into aggregate products seems absurd. Recycling should be the norm. It would be interesting for manufacturers to take up this subject. This is why we would like to know the opinion of Jérôme Lionet, President of Glass For Europe, an association which brings together the main glass manufacturers on our continent.
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