REDUCED USE OF NON-RENEWABLE RESOURCES

The construction industry’s increased appetite for raw materials represents 40%¹ of the global consumption. As a major consumer of virgin raw materials, the construction sector has a role to play in improving resource efficiency and waste management by transforming the linear model, where resources become waste, to a circular model, where waste can turn into a resource.

Resource-efficient construction emerges then as a system-wide approach to achieve sustainable construction by considering the flow of materials over the lifetime of a building. For new buildings, this means using less resource-intensive solutions, new technologies, recycled materials and new approaches to design and construction. For renovation projects, this conveys thinking about how to better recycle existing building materials to attain the same or even better performance.

Glass is a suitable material for recycling. It is indeed possible to produce glass with significant amounts of recycled material without altering its properties. The same product can thus be remanufactured while maintaining:

• Comparable optical quality  
• Identical mechanical performance  
• Equal durability  

We use cullet in our glass manufacturing process, helping to reduce our environmental footprint. Each ton of cullet used allows us to reduce the CO2 emissions of our glass by 700 kgs (considering scopes 1, 2 and 3), decrease by 1.2 tonnes our consumption of virgin raw materials  and lowers the energy needed for melting the batch by 30% (compared to melting primary raw materials).
 

¹ Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction, Global Status Reports 2017