Of the millions of tons of glass produced annually in the United States, only 25% of glass is recycled and non-soda lime silicate glass compositions used in smartphones and other electronic devices cannot be recycled at all.

Penn State University has received funding for the project, “Enabling Improved Glass Recycling Technology and Modeling Tools,” to help promote higher recycling rates in Pennsylvania.

Governor Tom Wolf announced a $2.3 million investment in 36 student research projects aimed at advancing innovation in several sectors of manufacturing.

The programme embeds the commonwealth’s best and brightest graduate and undergraduate students with local manufacturers to develop new technologies and advance innovation state wide.

John Mauro, professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State, will serve as the project’s principal investigator.

Penn State will partner with Remark Glass, a woman-owned start-up company focused on innovative and creative glass recycling, to address several technical challenges facing glass recycling.

“I am excited to partner with Remark Glass to help find solutions to expand glass recycling opportunities and reduce the amount of glass waste going into landfills,” said Prof. Mauro. “This funding will also provide a unique opportunity for one of our graduate students.”

Glass is, in principle, an infinitely recyclable material and lends itself to a variety of recycling processes.

For traditional glass manufacturing, the cullet must be sorted by colour, since mixed-colour glass cullet cannot be easily manufactured into new products with the desired optical properties.

Another challenge is to establish recycling streams for specialty, non-soda lime silicate, glasses such as Pyrex or Gorilla Glass.

To avoid sending these specialty glasses to the landfill, novel recycling techniques must be implemented, often in non-traditional applications.

This project will fund one graduate student to work closely with Prof. Mauro and Remark Glass to thoroughly characterize different colours and compositions of glass cullet and develop predictive models to allow for mixing of cullet and use of alternative compositions.

Characterization will include viscosity curves for press moulding, optical colour coordinates to predict and fine-tune glass colour, thermal expansion coefficient for thermal shock resistance, and liquidus temperature for quality control.

Predictive models will be developed and delivered to Remark Glass to enable the used of mixed-colour and mixed-composition cullet and tailor-design glass products and processes for use with recycled glass.

www.psu.edu

remarkglass.com

Caption: Pairing Penn State University students with companies such as Remark Glass expands recycling opportunities.