What *REALLY* happens to 'Recycled' Glass?! - (you might be surprised)

So today we are going to find out

what

really

happens

to

recycled

glass

. I think it's a little different than you

might

think. Also, at the end of the video we will talk about the C team. We can't let Linus' technical advice get out. done jerry let's get started so

glass

is a cool material it's inert meaning it doesn't react with

what

ever is inside it but that also means it doesn't break down in landfills it can take up to a million years to produce. Some of these things break down, but the good news is that they are also infinitely recyclable, which is what we are going to learn today about how glass is

recycled

and what we can use it for now.

I'm in the process of recycling here in salt. Lake City, where they handle glass in all its forms so we can turn it into something new. Here in the United States, there are many different ways to recycle glass. Some places have curbside pickup, other places have a large dumpster where you take the glass and leave it for pickup at a convenient location. Using the glass necklace that comes out of this recycling center uses forty percent less energy when creating new bottles. What is glass? Questions? Let me show you that we are going to start with all the glass lying in one place, this is the brown glass, the blue glass, the clear glass, even the flat glass, it is good, we don't have to pre-sort it, the sorting comes later, the Materials are taken with a giant front loader and dumped into a blue hopper that funnels all the glass onto a conveyor belt.

The conveyor belt takes the glass to a crusher. The good thing is that even broken glass can be recycled because as we know glass is glass and glass breaks, the crusher helps to break it. The bottles are reduced to usable pieces and can even be recycled when the labels and bottle caps are still in place after the crusher passes to a rotating screen. This machine helps separate glass and contaminants that are recognized when a glass bottle is broken. into small pieces, but if you break a plastic bottle, it just flattens out. This machine can differentiate between the two and separate them into different piles.

As you can see, this is a giant glass and the holes on this side are smaller than the holes on this side. so the particles fall out and the bigger things fall in here now that we have the broken glass separated into three separate pieces the tractor comes back picks up the glass and drops it into a new hopper we still have the molten metal bottle and some other contaminants inside the broken glass and this machine takes care of that, with giant magnets on top, it can lift the metals away from the glass shards. The magnet will extract all the ferrous metals and inject them into a collection container where they can also be recycled.

After the magnets, the glass goes into something called a fluidized bed dryer, the air is heated to 190 degrees Fahrenheit and at that temperature it burns off the sugars and bacteria and loosens the glue on the labels. This is the dryer that removes all those labels. It is nice. that all these processes do not have to be done by hand after the dryer there is another conveyor belt that takes the broken glass and up to this point all the glass is still united in the different colors when it reaches the top of the conveyor A waterfall falls on the belt glass and the optical sorter uses lasers and air blows to sort the glass in different areas and sort particles up to 3 8 of an inch, quite small.

The reason we do this is because glass has a different composition than optics. The sorter behind me can shoot 20,000 pieces of brown glass and ceramic every minute. Every time one of the lights flashes, it is a puff of air that carries away a piece of brown ceramic or glass. After the optical sorter, we come here to a hammer mill. which pulverizes the glass and takes it to this guy, who is the sorter, the tinted glass is then dropped into a giant container, so there's a lot of noise in there and I'm pretty sure my camera is covered in glass, but basically if there are pieces of glass. which are still too big after the classifier, go back to the pulverizer and repeat the process until it is a super fine material.

The superfine particles, or nippers, as they call them, are pumped into these giant silos and then transported in semi-trailer trucks to make new glass. bottles or something you probably don't expect pulverized glass powder is the basic ingredient for making new glass, uses 40 percent less energy and, as a bonus, reduces the amount of raw materials that must be extracted from the earth. Owens Corning is another facility located near me here in Utah they take advantage of these benefits to turn the dust from my broken bottles into another glass product that blows insulation for homes and buildings and yes the Corning at Owens Corning is the same Corning that makes Gorilla Glass. but instead of gorillas, this time it's a pink panther isolation pro.

Let's see how dust from glass bottles has become the pink insulation that keeps houses warm. It's a pretty fascinating process. First, the truck containing that recycled glass powder pulls up to the giant silo at Owens Corning and pumps its entire load of glass chunks into the huge silos on top of the building each day, a sieve providing the different ingredients used to fiberglass insulation in a holding hopper above the oven, 55 of which is recycled glass. We saw earlier that the holding hopper allows the glass to slowly drip into the giant furnace where it is heated to almost 3000 degrees.

The furnace here at Owens Corning is super interesting as it uses no fossil fuels to operate instead of burning coal to run its melter. Owens Corning melts its glass entirely with 100 percent renewable wind energy. I had no idea this was possible until now, but how does electricity melt glass with super massive electrodes? Quick pause for a second. The electrodes inside the giant furnace are actually these guys are right. here super super heavy with the huge copper end on the back, this is what a new one looks like, but after a period of time inside the oven, this is how they end up because the glass inside as we know is level six.

The higher the hardness scale and the electrode deteriorates or corrodes while it's in there, the glass just circulates like a giant crucible. All the electrodes inside the furnace create electrical arcs from end to end, sort of like the Iron Man arc reactor, and simply remove the electricity. from one point to another to keep the molten glass hot and how much electricity it requires. A glass melter of this size uses between 2.5 and 3.5 megawatts of electricity. The white crust on the surface of the molten glass is used to help regulate the temperature of that red hot liquid underneath like a blanket.

It is interesting that when the glass is in a solid state it does not conduct electricity. It is an insulator as we know since we are currently doing insulation but when the glass is molten or in a liquid state it conducts electricity. The white smoke you saw coming out of the tower earlier is just water vapor coming from the cooling and air purification system. The red and blue tube running around the outside of the fuser helps keep the electrodes and side walls cool after the glass has melted, flowing like a molten red river through these brick paths to what we call the fibrizers.

Right now we're still on the upper levels of the factory, using gravity to drop molten glass at 2000 degrees onto the spinners that throw the glass out. into super fine fibrous threads, kind of like cotton candy, except we arrived just in time for a scheduled maintenance. Whenever a fiberizer needs parts replaced, they funnel the molten glass away from the unit, where it is sent to break down in cold water and become like the little pieces of glue we saw before, since glass can be recycled infinitely, not here They waste nothing, so when glass is diverted from those cotton candy machines, it ends up being returned and this broken glass can be reused. into the system as many times as necessary, nothing is wasted and when the fibrizer finishes replacing the parts, they can start dripping glass to the top again to continue the production of forbidden cotton candy, the fiber that comes out of these fibrizers is white and feels as soft as cotton, it is safe to touch with bare hands.

The interesting thing about fiber is that it is biosoluble, meaning that if you accidentally breathe in the fibers, they will not cause damage to your lungs. This same white fluff. It is even used for composite fibers in space suits. This yellow conveyor belt you see here is located just below the fibrizers, collecting the soft bed of white glass in a cloud shape and transporting it to the hammer mill, kind of like we saw at the recycling center. except instead of breaking glass shards, this is breaking down the matte lint into much smaller pieces of insulating material that can be blown away.

Finally, down here on the main level is where we added the trademark pink pigment so everyone can tell the difference from the pros. pink panther brand insulation and other things, finally robotic arms collect the pink insulation into bags and load it onto pallets for easy shipping nationwide. It's crazy to think that the 15 bottles I had at the beginning of this video have now been converted. in just one of these insulation bags and the cool thing is that it takes 40 percent less energy to turn recycled glass into something new than it does to make glass from scratch.

It is a victory for the planet on multiple levels. I know I personally will. I will make more of an effort in the future to recycle my glass as it is much better to reuse it and turn it into something new, such as bottles or insulation to keep homes comfortable, both of which are much better options than spending the next million years in a landfill. . Not all garbage is garbage, as you have seen, some of it can be recycled and turned into new things, so it is important to take measures to reduce the amount of garbage we produce, but equally important is to remove garbage from places where that doesn't belong.

That's where Team Ve comes in. Team Ve has successfully funded the removal of 30 million pounds of trash from the oceans, which is a very impressive and successful effort, but with 7 billion people on the planet that trash is still there. arriving. I realized that Linus' Tech Tips We removed 25,069 pounds of trash from the ocean and I think we can surpass that. I say this because all of this is possible since you guys watch my videos, so with the 25,690 pounds of junk removed from the Jerryrig, that puts us right on top of Linus. The donation link is still active at teamsees.org.

You can still donate if you haven't already, but the most important thing is to make sure you don't throw away things that are still useful and can be turned into something new, like glass, plastic, or metals. That's still very valuable, thanks to the recycling push and Owens Corning for its factory tours. I'm sure you're doing your part to reduce waste and let me know in the comments what else you'd like to see recycled. I think making videos like this. It's so much fun, hit the subscribe button if you haven't come hang out with me on Instagram and Twitter yet and thank you so much for watching.

See you there.