It should be noted that the rate of decomposition can depend upon landfill conditions. Glass is made from silica (the same material sand is made of), which is very stable and a prominent constituent of Earth. Forests are being cut and trees are being felled at an unimaginable rate of 100 acres per minute. In case of glass, it is really tough to decompose. According to The Public Recycling Officials of Pennsylvania, for every ton of paper that is recycled, the following 17 trees are saved. They perform a valuable service as Earth’s cleanup crew. Decomposers feed on dead things: dead plant materials such as leaf litter and wood, animal carcasses, and feces. Steel and aluminum can be both recycled and reused repeatedly. Nature has its own recycling system: a group of organisms called decomposers. But the shocking fact is that if glass is thrown away in landfills, it takes million years to decompose. Simply breaking down glass and melting it, we can produce new glass. Glass is very easy to recycle mainly for the fact that glass is made of sand. But plastic bags we use in our everyday life take 10-20 years to decompose, while plastic bottles take 450 - 700 years. Normally, plastic items can take up to 1000 years to decompose in landfills. And according to some sources, it doesn’t decompose at all. But the shocking fact is that if glass is thrown away in landfills, it takes a million years to decompose. By simply breaking down the glass and melting it, we can produce new glass. It is not surprising that plastic bottles constitute close to 50% of recyclable waste in the dumps. Glass is normally very easy to recycle due to the fact that its made of sand. Almost every hour, nearly 250,000 plastic bottles are dumped. Glass can be recycled over and over again with no loss of quality, but when discarded and dumped into a landfill, it does not decompose. With the bottles crushed into fine sand, any possibility of counterfeiting is also “crushed”.From an environmental perspective, answer to this question is one of great importance. Glass2Sand aims to address the environmental concerns raised by the non-treatment of waste that was rendered worthless by the new government policy by converting it into a revenue-generating commercially valuable by-product.Īnd address the exploitation of the rag-pickers by the glass recycling units that allowed the prices to fluctuate and were whimsical in honouring their collection commitments. Thanks to these efforts, Glass2Sand is now powered by an innovative cut-technology based Made-In-India machine.Ī new day for Glass2Sand, as Glass2Sand becomes a “carbon negative” initiative. Over recent months, Udit allocated his energies towards fixing this major bottleneck. High-load import related carbon emissions linked to the New Zealand machine troubled Udit. His project was deemed worthy of a special grant from the New Zealand High Commissioner in India, H.E. His search ended in New Zealand, with an innovative environmentally friendly technology. Glass does not decompose for a million years. Scarce landfill space was already a concern for the local municipal bodies. Empty glass bottles were not segregated anymore and started to go for dumping in the landfills. Collection of glass bottles for recycling had become unviable for them because of dropping demand and because large storage spaces were needed and the transport costs were high. Udit found that the waste collectors (kabadis) had stopped paying the few rupees per bottle that they did. When empty glass bottles started to pile up at home, Udit Singhal, then a 16-year-old student in New Delhi asked why?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |