ScienceDaily (Sep. 19, 2011) — British science has led to a use for waste glass that cannot be recycled that could help clean up polluted waterways by acting as an ion-exchange filter to remove lead, cadmium and other toxic metals.
Details are published in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Environment and Waste Management.
Only a fraction of waste glass bottles and jars can be recycled, partly because much of the glass is colored, brown or green, and partly because the market sustains only a limited weight of recyclable glass. Millions of tons of waste container glass are generated across Europe. As such, large amounts of waste glass, purportedly for recycling, are shipped to China and elsewhere to be ground up and used as hardcore filling materials for road building.