Recycle Glass Week

Our sales guy Ron is always asking me about recycling wine bottles and how that works, so just for him, I'll copy over some text from a mailer that arrived today.

According to The Wine Mirror, Recycle Glass Week was September 12-18th (just got the mailer today, 10/6).

Glass containers, such as wine bottles, beer bottles, and glass jars, are endlessly recyclable without a loss of quality or purity. The recycled crushed glass, known as cullet, is used to replace or supplement raw materials, including sand, soda ash and limestone. Turning recycled glass into new containers requires an average of 40% less energy than is required for raw materials alone. For every six tons of recycled container glass used, a ton of carbon dioxide is reduced in the process.

Regardless of color, all container glass can be recycled. To produce Flint (clear) glass, cullet needs to be color-sorted in order to avoid putting too much colorant to finished glass. Optical resorting systems allow us to do this but, ideally, glass should be sorted by color as in some countries, such as Switzerland and New Zealand.

SGCI 2010 * Special Issue, A Verallia Publication

I pulled that directly off the mailer - there are a few other tips, like removing metal capsules from the glass before recycling, but that's about it. I looked up Verallia.com and found a link to their recycling info page, http://www.verallia.com/all-about-glass/recycling/?lang=en

Ok, so they are in France and it's not directly relevant to recycling in the U.S. but mostly I wanted to poke fun at receiving the mailer three weeks past the date of the event. :-p