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If your first thought is: “meh, glass? Who cares?”
Imagine all the flat glass needed for photovoltaics, green buildings, window upgrades/weatherization, & electric vehicles.
Energy transitions will require a tremendous amount of flat glass. We need to stop landfilling that 89%. https://twitter.com/DustinMulvaney/status/1263711942511714306
Imagine all the flat glass needed for photovoltaics, green buildings, window upgrades/weatherization, & electric vehicles.
Energy transitions will require a tremendous amount of flat glass. We need to stop landfilling that 89%. https://twitter.com/DustinMulvaney/status/1263711942511714306
Meeting terawatt-level photovoltaics production "will necessitate an unprecedented expansion in capacity of the flat glass industry... almost twenty times the value of the current annual flat-glass market." https://www.bnl.gov/isd/documents/88585.pdf
Recycled can be recycled indefinitely. Whats *cool* is incorporating recycled cullet lowers the melt-point for float glass. This avoids further energy use/combustion emissions. 2-3.5% energy savings for each 10% recycled cullet. Extends furnace life too. (Jeswiet & Pearse 2009)
*Recycled GLASS
This is the correct citation for the energy savings claims above. Its a neat paper from 2009 suggesting an industrial symbiosis between glass recycling, flat glass & photovoltaics manufacturing, with substantial embodied energy savings. #industrialecology https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5444358
"North American float glass industry went from 44 working glass lines in 37 plants to 34 lines in 25 plants between 2005 and 2015. Similarly, several countries in Western Europe also witnessed reductions in capacity from 2005 to 2015." https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/B9780128150603000153?token=94DD4FFC8AE37DF69CA86D2484C957946BBF105146916BAC7280D4BCCD883AE9E0E007AE919106F9771AAF237269FB1E
Big challenge w/flat glass recycling: Most flat glass waste (>1/2) is construction & demolition waste.
"Construction & Demo Waste (C&DW) estimates suggest the proportion of flat glass in C&DW to be 0.4% to 0.2%"
Need better collection & design-4-recovery. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128150603000153
"Construction & Demo Waste (C&DW) estimates suggest the proportion of flat glass in C&DW to be 0.4% to 0.2%"
Need better collection & design-4-recovery. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128150603000153
End-of-life vehicles are recycled @ high rates. 10% of flat glass goes into new vehicles. ~1 gigaton of glass can be recycled annually from EoL vehicles in Europe+USA+China+Japan alone. ~0 EoL glass from vehicles goes back to flat glass; what is recycled goes to container glass.
This graph shows growth in ultra-clear rolled glass - a type of flat glass used in PV (ultra-clear float glass the other) - as a portion of overall flat glass. Its old, but map it to the curve for PV production. ~0 EoL PV glass goes back to flat glass. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1134/S1087659615010198.pdf
2 reasons explain why EoL PV glass is not bought by flat glass brokers: encapsulant & antimony (Sb) contamination.
Germany rewrote rules to facilitate PV recycling. India considering similar. http://164.100.94.214/sites/default/files/webform/notices/DraftBluePrintAntimony.pdf
Germany rewrote rules to facilitate PV recycling. India considering similar. http://164.100.94.214/sites/default/files/webform/notices/DraftBluePrintAntimony.pdf
In the US we lack public support for solar panel recycling. The public has supported solar recycling in Europe for over a decade. Customers asked for it; regulators made it happen. Unfortunately, the lack of public support does not move the US industry. https://twitter.com/DustinMulvaney/status/997571648663441408?s=20
In the ANSI standard we developed with NSFI. There are points for manufacturers having #ExtendedProducerResponsibility and using recycled content in materials used to make PV cells and modules. Baby steps... but a start. https://blog.ansi.org/2020/05/solar-pv-sustainability-leadership-ansi-457/#gref
Manufacturing glass can expose workers to silica dust & cause acute silicosis. By June 2018 glass manufacturers had to comply with new @OSHA_DOL rules to prevent silica exposures. Deadly Dust: Reducing the Risks of Silica Dust in Glass Working Operations. https://ceramics.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781119519713.ch14
