According to an ancient legend, the inventors of glass are the Phoenician traders. Returning from their wanderings, they stopped on the island and lit a fire. From the high heat, the sand began to melt and turned into a glassy mass. Glass is an amorphous substance and in some of its properties approaches a liquid. This is one of the few materials that can be recycled one hundred percent without losing its properties.
Instructions
Step 1
Glass consists of soda, lime and 70% quartz sand. Lime impurities give it gloss and resistance to various chemical influences.
Step 2
Glass is a durable and highly wear-resistant material. Waste from it is destroyed in the natural environment for hundreds of years. From temperature changes, they crack and crumble. Gradually turning into the final decay product - glass chips, unusually similar to sand.
Step 3
Glass products that have served their time are easy to recycle. The glass is remelted. Moreover, it is 40 times cheaper to make a new product from broken glass than to make the same from primary raw materials.
Step 4
Not all glass is suitable for recycling. Pottery, tableware, and broken glass objects cannot be remelted.
Step 5
Glass waste must be separated by color. This is due to the fact that each color has its own melting point. Sorted glass is carefully crushed, poured into molds and remelted in a muffle furnace into a glass mass. It is imperative to add primary materials (silicon, lime and soda). And already from the re-melted glass, new products are cast.
Step 6
To give the glass the desired color, various metal oxides should be added to it. For example, uranium oxide will give a yellow tint, and nickel will paint purple, while iron oxide will make glass blue and even brownish red, depending on the concentration.
Step 7
The melting point of glass is very high and depends on its color. The darker the glass to be recycled, the higher the temperature is needed to remelt it. To give the glass the required shape, you need to heat it up to 1000 degrees Celsius.
