The market
It is estimated that the world uses 3,200 billion containers of all types each year to package food and drinks - and this figure continues to increase. Almost everything ends in waste. Glass is a minor component. Each year, some 100 billion bottles and glass jars are produced in highly automated installations which can crush up to a million bottles per day of an average value of less than a half-dollar. In addition to the packaging glass, the flat glass is used at home and in cars, which represents 44 million tonnes. The flat glass market is estimated at more than $ 50 billion a year. Glass is a $ 100 billion market.
The glass has been produced for 9,000 years and the first bottle appeared 3,500 years ago. However, recycling bins were only introduced in the 1970s. While countries like Sweden reach a recycling rate of 90 %, the American average is less than 40 %, California being at the top with almost 80 %. The United Kingdom has a great preference for glass containers, which it is estimated to represent 8 billion units or 3.6 million tonnes, less than a million tonnes are recycled. The rest is found in the landfills.
The glass is made from sand rich in silica and can be reused indefinitely. The glass manufacturing process is energy delicious. A ton of virgin glass requires four gigabia of energy. The transformation of used bottles into new containers reduces carbon emissions by around 17 %, while avoiding mining. However, recycling is expensive. The members of the European Union and many American states impose an instruction which improves the economic situation. The fact of charging as little as 5 cents per container in America and 25 cents for a one liter bottle in Europe creates a secondary market. Unfortunately, the high cost of collection, transport and the obligation to separate according to the color has not been offset by taxes and fees. Even the major campaigns carried out by consumers and governments do not seem to improve the appliance of school companies for more recycled glass. Thus, it is estimated that 65 billion bottles and jars are wasted each year.
Innovation
Converting bottles in bottles may seem logical. However, asking the trees to transform leaves into leaves in the spring has no sense from a physical, chemical and biological point of view. Just as the leaves are transformed into land by microorganisms, mushrooms and earthworms, innovation imagined by Andrew Ugerleider and Gay Dillingham in the United States consists in transforming non-recyclable mixtures of white, green and brown glass In a glass foam offering a wide range of potential applications, with the exception of the manufacture of bottles. It seems that the bottle itself is the bottleneck to reuse this natural resource.
The grinding of used glass powder, heated by injecting CO2, creates a foam, light but abrasive, solid and inexpensive. The discharges being concerned with reducing their load, recovery of glass on site and its local transformation into glass foam gives rise to a new economic model: "entrepreneurs are paid to receive raw materials". Innovation is not limited to a cascade of materials where waste from one is an intrusive for the other, innovation extends to the corporate model where key ingredients come with money. In addition, if the factory is located near a discharge (or even on it), the production installation could benefit from the methane generated by the decomposition of organic waste, transforming this greenhouse gas into a Cheap energy source, thus reducing costs while further decreasing its negative impact on climate change.
The first cash flow
Ungerleider and Dillingham then created Earthstone in 1994. Motivated by their desire to reduce the open -air mining, they transformed a technique known to a new company and quickly found a simple entry into the niche market of physical abrasives. Recycled glass blocks, with air bubbles and frustles similar to resistant diatoms silica, clean up a barbecue grid, remove paint or smooth fiber panels. Since manipulation is limited to cutting blocks of glass foam into abrasives easy to handle, and that the competition is expensive and has a well documented negative impact on the environment, supplies like Home Depot have started to offer The product based on recycled glass. Once the first sales are confirmed, production has increased and improved by progressing on the experience curve, going from a discontinuous system to a continuous system, using more and more local materials at lower cost, thus becoming more competitive.
The opportunity
The scope of applications is large. While the American company Pittsburgh Corning, using a similar technique, has decided to focus on the building materials market, with its first glass recycling plant in Belgium and a second in the Czech Republic, Ungerleider and Dillingham discovered a large range of applications. Today, Earthstone has eleven applications for recycled glass on the market. The latest consists in providing hydroponic agriculture with a growth environment, made of glass foam, which can be permanently recycled, thus eliminating a flow of waste weighed on this slang industry.
The Swedish building entrepreneur Åke Mård, located in Sundsvall, Sweden, took blocks of glass foam and transformed them into foundations, walls and even prefabricated roofs for houses. He discovered that glass - filled with tiny air bubbles - serves as a fire -resistant structural material, not just insulation. This innovative construction technique was approved by the European Union. No water enters these blocks, no vermin frays a path through the walls, no fungus is developing in the basement and the insulation factor surpasses the known alternatives in terms of price and performance. Mård realized that recycled glass fulfills four functions while serving as a physical structure.
The critical mass necessary to operate a commercially viable oven is estimated at 5 million bottles per year. In 2009, Earthstone treated 5.3 million bottles per year and was profitable. If we consider the consumption of 200 glass bottles per family and per year, it takes around 25,000 families for this activity to be viable. The barrier at the entrance is relatively low. The main cost is energy, which could be provided by a company with excess heat grouping activities as do natural systems, or which could be derived from methane gas from organic waste which generally accompanies glass. The creation of these factories generates jobs, while improving the quality of building materials at competitive prices, releasing business spirit everywhere, reducing the need for transport and extracted materials.
