Glass or plastic: which is better for

the environment?
(Image credit: Getty Images)

By Claudia Lee, BBC

27th April 2023
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic-which-is-better-for-the-environment

For centuries we have used glass to store food, beverages, chemicals and
cosmetics. But is it time to find a more sustainable alternative?
Dating back to between 325 and 350 AD, the Speyer wine bottle is thought to be the world's oldest
bottle of wine. Now held in the Wine Museum in the German city of Speyer, where it was
rediscovered in 1867, an analysis of its contents revealed that it holds an ethanol-based
liquid. But the glass bottle remains unopened and the vintage unknown. Any prospective wine
tasters should be wary – preserved historic beverages can be pungent, to say the least.

The widespread use of glass as a storage vessel throughout history highlights the material's
resilience and functionality. Glass is a useful material for everything from preserving food to
carrying the signals that power the internet. So essential is glass to human development that
the United Nations named 2022 the International Year of Glass to celebrate its contribution to
cultural and scientific development.

Glass has sometimes been referred to as a material which can infinitely be recycled without it
impacting its quality, purity or durability. Recycled glass can be crushed into glass cullets, which
can be melted down and used to produce more glass. Glass used for packaging has a high
recycling rate compared to other packaging materials. In Europe, the average glass recycling
rate is 76%, compared to 41% for plastic packaging and 31% for wooden packaging.

When glass is left in the natural environment, it is less likely to cause pollution than plastic. Unlike
plastics, which break down into microplastics that can leach into our soils and water, glass is
non-toxic. "Glass is mainly made of silica, which is a natural substance," says Franziska
Trautmann, the co-founder of Glass Half Full, a New Orleans-based company that recycles glass
into sand that can be used for coastal restoration and disaster relief. Silica, also known as silica
dioxide, makes up 59% of the Earth's crust. Since it is a natural compound, there is no
concern about leaching or environmental degradation.

Glass production requires huge amounts of sand - a rapidly shrinking natural resource (Credit:
Edwin Remsburg / Getty Images)
Because of this, glass is often touted as a more sustainable alternative to plastic.

However, glass bottles have a higher environmental footprint than plastic and other bottled
container materials including drinks cartons and aluminum cans. The mining of silica sand
can cause significant environmental damage, ranging from land deterioration to the loss of
biodiversity. Violations of basic workers' rights have also been found in Shankargarh,
India, which is the biggest supplier of silica sand to the country's glass industry. Some studies
have also shown that extended exposure to silica dust can pose a public health risk, as it can
lead to acute silicosis, an irreversible, long-term lung disease caused by the inhalation of silica
dust over an extended period of time. Silicosis may first appear as a persistent cough or shortness
of breath, and may result in respiratory failure.

Extracting sand for glass production may also have contributed to the current global sand
shortage. Sand is the second most-used resource in the world after water – people use
some 50 billion tonnes of "aggregate", the industry term for sand and gravel, each year.

Its uses range from land regeneration to microchips. According to the UN, sand is now used
faster than it can be replenished.

Glass requires higher temperatures than plastic and aluminum to melt and form, says Alice Brock,
a PhD researcher at University of Southampton in the UK. Raw materials for making virgin glass
also release greenhouse gases during the melting process, adding to its environmental footprint.
According to the International Energy Agency, the container and flat-glass industries emit over 60
megatonnes of CO2 per year. It may seem surprising, but Brock's study found that plastic bottles
are less environmentally damaging than glass bottles. Although plastic cannot be endlessly
recycled, the manufacturing process is less energy-intensive, as there is a lower melting point for
plastics compared with glass.

The raw materials for glass are melted together in a furnace at 1500C (2732F). The molten glass
is then removed from the furnace, shaped and moulded. Glass production facilities often add a
portion of recycled glass cullets into the raw material mix. Generally, a 10% increase in glass cullet
into the container glass melting mixture can decrease energy consumption by 2-3%. This is
because it requires a lower melting point to melt glass cullet compared to the virgin
materials used to produce glass. In turn, this slightly reduces the CO2 emissions produced during
manufacturing.

A key problem with glass recycling is that it does not eradicate the remelting process, which is the
most energy intensive part of glass production. It accounts for 75% of the energy consumption
during production. Even though glass containers can be reused an average of 12-20 times,
glass is often treated as single-use. Single-use glass disposed of at landfills can take up to one
million years to decompose. Glass recycling rates vary significantly across the globe. The EU
and the UK have an average recycling rate of 74% and 76%, while the US figure was 31.3% in
2018.

Glass can be recycled endlessly without loss in quality and durability (Credit: Remko de Waal /
Getty Images)
One reason for the US' poorer figures is that recycled material is usually collected in a "single
stream", meaning all materials are mixed together. Single-stream recycling often complicates the
sorting process, since glass must be separated from other recyclables and sorted by colour,
before it can be remelted. Often, it is too time-consuming, and therefore expensive, to separate
mixed coloured glass at a recycling facility. Instead of being converted to new bottles, the
broken pieces of mixed glass are turned into glass fibre products that can be used for
insulation. Glass cullet is the highest quality when it is separated from other recyclables
from the beginning – this is known as multi-stream recycling.
The colour of glass affects how pure the stream needs to be. While green glass can use 95% of
recycled glass; white or colourless glass, also known as "flint glass", has higher quality
specifications and only permits up to 60% recycled glass because any contamination affects
the quality.

Recycled glass must be melted down twice, once into cullets and then again into a new product –
which is why recycled glass might only be fractionally less energy-intensive than virgin glass.

There is no doubt that glass still plays an important role in many industries. Its durability and non-
toxic properties make it ideal for foods and materials which require preserving. However, the
assumption that glass is sustainable merely because it is infinitely recyclable is misconstrued.
Considering its entire lifecycle, glass production may be equally as detrimental to the environment
as plastic.

The next time you want to discard a glass bottle, perhaps consider reusing it first. Glass is a
resilient, long-lasting material that is not made to be thrown away after only being used once.