Month: February 2019

Stainless steel is a green product. It is 100% recyclable, as it is not coated with any toxic material it does not produce toxic run-off. A huge difference can be made by companies and individuals by simply choosing stainless steel over non-recyclable materials. During production, stainless steel uses scrap metal as its primary raw material , with up to 70% of the product coming from recycled material. Increased efficiency in process technology has also decreased the amount of energy required to manufacture stainless steel. Even if stainless steel is not recycled and it does find its way to a landfill or disposal site, it will have no detrimental effect to the soil or groundwater. Stainless Steel is the preferred material for green building throughout the world. Its impact on the environment is minimal when compared to other materials and its life impact reduces significantly as it used and recycled.

LED lights are up to 80% more efficient than traditional lighting such as fluorescent and incandescent lights. 95% of the energy in LEDs is converted into light and only 5% is wasted as heat. This is compared to fluorescent lights which convert 95% of energy to heat and only 5% into light! LED lights also draw much less power than traditional lighting; a typical 84 watt fluorescent can be replaced by a 36 watt LED to give the same level of light. Less energy use reduces the demand from power plants and decreases greenhouse gas emissions.

A glass bottle that is sent to a landfill can take up to a million years to break down. By contrast, it takes as little as 30 days for a recycled glass bottle to leave your recycling bin and appear on a store shelf as a new glass container.  Glass containers are 100-percent recyclable, which means they can be recycled repeatedly, again and again, with no loss of purity or quality in the glass.  Recovered glass from glass recycling is the primary ingredient in all new glass containers. A typical glass container is made of as much as 70 percent recycled glass. According to industry estimates, 80 percent of all recycled glass eventually ends up as new glass containers.  Every ton of glass that is recycled saves more than a ton of the raw materials needed to create new glass, including ,300 pounds of sand; 410 pounds of soda ash; and 380 pounds of limestone. Making new glass means heating sand and other substances to a temperature of 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit, which requires a lot of energy and creates a lot of industrial pollution, including greenhouse gases. One of the first steps in glass recycling is to crush the glass and create a product called “cullet.” Making recycled glass products from cullet consumes 40 percent less energy than making new glass from raw materials because cullet melts at a much lower temperature. Because glass is made from natural and stable materials such as sand and limestone, glass containers have a low rate of chemical interaction with their contents. As a result, glass can be safely reused, for example as refillable water bottles. It can even be used to make fences and walls. Besides serving as the primary ingredient in new glass containers, recycled glass also has many other commercial uses — from creating decorative tiles and landscaping material to rebuilding eroded beaches.