Increase Glass Recycling

Although glass is 100% recyclable, only about one-third gets recycled in the US.  (Compared to 90% in Switzerland).  

Americans dispose of some 10 million metric tons of glass annually.  Most of it ends up in the trash.  Of the glass that does get recycled, most is comingled with aluminum & steel cans, various types of plastic, newspaper, junk mail, cardboard, and other paper products in what is called single-stream curbside collection in many US municipalities.

Additionally, many people mistakenly include garbage and non-recyclable items in the recycle bin which leads to higher costs to separate and lower actual rates of recycling.

You can help by being careful to only include recyclable items in the bins and requesting multi-stream recycling in your community. Multi-stream recycling means sorting your recyclables into types and can raise the amount of glass recylced from 40% in single stream to 90% in multistream recycling.