Glass can be recycled again and again with no loss in quality or purity. Glass containers go from your blue bin to store shelves in as little as 30 days—again and again. Why else should we recycle glass? Recycling 1 glass bottle saves enough energy to light a 100 watt light bulb for 4 hours.

Glass is easy to recycle so why do we continue to see glass bottles along the roadside or in the trash? In New York state, bottles that have a deposit attached to them get recycled at a very high rate, but the ones that aren’t worth the nickel are thrown away. Even if there is no deposit, that glass bottle can still be recycled.

Recycling glass is a very simple process. The glass is collected and sorted by color and then crushed into cullet, or glass that is run through a screen making it into a uniform size. The glass is then mixed in with the other raw materials, heated and formed into new jars and bottles.

Mixed color cullet is considered lower quality but it can still be used for fiberglass fabrication, to create reflective surfaces, or as road aggregate - the material used as abase underneath pavement.

Please recycle your glass, it is 100% recyclable and can be turned into many “new” products.