Glass – recyclable again and again.
There is no limit to the number of times glass can be recycled and there is practically no loss in quality. Today, waste glass is the most important raw material for new glass packaging. In 2004, around 2.5 million tonnes of old glass in Germany was processed into new glass packaging. This means that nine out of every ten bottles are recycled. Only 60,000 tonnes of the approx. 2.8 million tonnes of glass collected are used for different kinds of recycling, for example to make glass wool or other kinds of building materials.
Final consumers dispose of their old glass in bottle banks which are divided up according to the colour of the glass to make it easier to process the material. Today there are more than 300,000 such "on-the-go" bottle banks ensuring that all areas of the country have access to such containers.
Once collected, the glass is broken up in a processing plant and cleaned. It is very important at this stage to remove any unwanted materials and to separate the glass once again according to colour. Once this has been completed, the pure glass granulates are further processed at glassworks businesses, i.e. melted down and mixed with other raw materials (e.g. quartz sand or soda) to create new glass containers.
90% of all old glass is recycled.