Glass is created with sand made from quartz. The sand is mixed with the chemical compounds lime and soda and heated until the mixture melts. The super-hot liquid looks something like thick, syrupy toffee, which is poured or shaped. As it cools, the liquid hardens into glass. Window glass and drinking glasses contain additional materials.

In Bermuda, glass makes up approximately 10 percent of our waste. If it is thrown in with trash sent to Tynes Bay for incineration, and not put in separate blue bags with tin and aluminium cans, it reduces the efficiency of the incineration.

In some countries glass bottles are sorted into different colours (clear; green or blue; and brown) and then are crushed and melted down to make new bottles. Because there is no glass manufacturing on a large scale in Bermuda, we can't recycle glass here, and it is too expensive to ship the glass overseas for recycling, it has to be dealt with in another way. Glass should be put into blue bags, so it can be separated from the rest of the trash at the Material Recovery Facility at the Government Quarry in Hamilton Parish.

There the glass is separated from the tin and aluminium and crushed. The crushed glass is used for various projects, including aggregate for asphalt or as free-draining fill in different construction applications.

Glass bottles can be reused if they are strong enough to survive collection, cleaning and refilling. In the past, glass soda bottles were returned to the local bottling plants and reused; that is no longer the case, however. Today glass bottles can be cleaned and reused for storing a variety of items.

In the newspaper

Skim through the grocery ads in The Royal Gazette to find five different examples of product packaging (e.g. glass bottle, cardboard box, aluminium can). For each decide whether it is reusable, recyclable or non-recyclable. What would be the benefit of buying juice in an aluminium can rather than in a glass bottle?