Glass is one of the easiest substances to keep out of the waste stream. All glass bottles and jars – clear or coloured, whole or broken, are 100% recycleable.
Recycling does a lot more than keeping bottles out of our landfills and broken glass off our beaches: it's much more energy-efficient to produce new glass products from recycled bottles than from freshly-sourced raw material. Recycling one glass bottle saves the same amount of energy as powering a 100-watt light bulb for an hour.
To find a glass bank near you, just SMS “Glass” and the name of your suburb to 32310, and voila. You can also find a glass bank near you online.
Note that the following kinds of glass aren’t suitable for bottle banks: light bulbs, car headlights, drinking glasses, crockery and cookware, window panes, laboratory glass, and computer and TV screens.
- Olivia Rose-Innes, EnviroHealth Editor, Health24, November 2011