Just in one month, nearly every single American throws out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper!  Every single one of these jars are 100% recyclable!  Just the energy saved from recycling one glass bottle alone can run a 100-watt light bulb for four hours, not to mention it also causes about 20% less air pollution and over 50% less water pollution than when a company has to make a new bottle from raw materials.

Just one of today’s glass bottles will take four thousand years or more to decompose. This takes even longer if it’s buried in a landfill.  The mining and transporting raw materials for glass alone produces about four hundred pounds of waste for every one ton of glass that is made and, with the ability to recycle, this is a needless waste of resources.  If recycled glass is substituted for just half of the raw materials, which is obtained by harsh, land destroying, strip mining practices, the waste is cut by nearly 95%!

Glass is a material that most if not all, curbside collection programs pick up to be taken to your local recycling center. Glass is also taken in at most municipal recycling centers. Here are some very important reasons to recycle your glass containers: The typical glass jar or bottle is usually made up of 70% recycled glass.

Nearly 80% of recycled glass as a whole will end up as new glass containers such as peanut butter jars, drinking glasses, decorative food containers, etc. Unlike other recyclable substances, such as paper, glass can be recycled over and over again without any loss of purity or quality. It will never break down or disintegrate the way tree pulp does.

In order to create new glass, sand must be heated to 2600 degrees Fahrenheit, which consumes vast amounts of energy and creates tons of pollution from factories.  However, recycled glass is simply turned into crushed glass which uses 50% less energy than making glass from raw materials because it melts at a lower temperature than the raw ingredients.

It takes up to one million years for one single glass bottle to break down if it is buried in a landfill, which means it sits and takes up valuable space for one million years if it is not recycled.

You can get cash for your glass bottles in eleven different states in the U.S., meaning that if you take the time to recycle them you come away with some extra money in your pocket. It takes as little as one month for a recycled glass container can go from recycling bin to your local store shelf, and because glass is made from natural materials like sand, it has nearly zero toxic chemicals and practically no interaction with the contents of the container. This makes it a safe packaging material that can be used decade after decade.

Recycled glass is used in a number of consumer driven areas, such as creating easily maintained sports turf, in the manufacturing of beautiful kitchen tiles and providing pretty sand to depleted beaches.