Tread lightly: Recycle glass bottles

This week's Tread lightly pledge is to recycle your glass bottles

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Glass bottles for recycling
Despite the ease of recycling, glass still accounts for 7% of the waste in the average dustbin. Photograph: Frank Baron

This week on Tread Lightly we are asking you to pledge to recycle your glass bottles.

Glass is one of the few materials that can be recycled indefinitely and considerably less carbon dioxide is produced when making glass from recycled containers than when creating it from scratch.

According to Wasteonline, once transport and processing are accounted for, 315kg of CO2 are saved for every tonne of glass melted.

Bottle banks have been around in the UK for two decades, and there are now around 50,000 on some 20,000 sites around the country.

In addition, recycling schemes run by individual councils usually include glass items (Find out about schemes near you at Despite this, glass accounts for 7% of the waste in the average dustbin, and around 14m glass bottles and jars are sent to landfill every day, where they linger for centuries.

On average, each household in the UK uses 331 glass bottles and jars a year. Recycling, rather than dumping them would save enough energy to power a computer for five days. While this may not sound that much, adding together energy savings from households across the UK can make quite a difference. For example, British Glass estimates that the 587,000 tonnes of glass recycled in 2001, saved enough energy to launch 10 space shuttle missions.

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