While many shops donate used windshields to police academies or rage rooms, others recycle them in the traditional way. glassBYTEs/AGRR consulted one of the largest windshield recycling companies in North America to find out what happens to that glass once shops drop it off.
Shark Solutions is a Denmark-based company that processes windshields and architectural glass to reuse the PVB (PolyVinyl Butyral) from the laminate. The company’s website says its North American division deals almost exclusively with windshields, which it gets from “auto glass replacement companies, glass distributors, glass manufacturers, vehicle distributors, vehicle manufacturers, municipalities, end-of-life vehicle yards, and many more.”
According to Greg Cornett, operations manager for glass in North America, windshield recycling is very efficient.
Unlike many other recyclable items Greg Cornett says all parts of a windshield can be used. Photo Credit: Ildar Sagdejev via Wikimedia Commons.
“You can’t always get all the components of many recycled items back into the value stream,” he says. “With recycled windshields, we separate the metal and rubber as best as we can … and we have downstream customers that take 100% of the windshield [elements to repurpose].”
Cornett says the PVB interlayer alone has many possible uses.
“We turn it back into liquid, and it makes it more robust,” he says. “It’s UV protectant. Some of the military uses it in their uniforms to make it better for soldiers in the field.”
The glass itself is crushed up into cullet. The cullet produced by Shark Solutions mainly becomes insulation, Cornett says.
“Fiberglass companies spin it into the kind of insulation you find in your roof and walls,” he says. “Bigger cullet goes into road reflectors. A couple of optical companies use very fine cullet powder to polish prescription eyeglass lenses. There’s a host of different customers that use our end product.”
Cullet can also be processed into glass beading for polishing, though Cornett says that is not as common with his customers.
Very little makes a windshield un-recyclable, he says. It has to be single-source, uncolored glass without a lot of organic contamination. The biggest problems occur when people try to mix other kinds of glass, like tempered glass or glass containers, with windshields. That glass doesn’t work for insulation.
Cornett says it’s beneficial for shops to recycle the glass rather than throw it away. Not only does it help the environment, it’s typically cheaper. Landfills frequently charge for disposal, he says, but Shark Solutions doesn’t.
“You’d still have to figure out the logistics to take it to the landfill,” Cornett says. “Just bring it to us instead, we’ll take it for free.”
He encourages businesses of all sizes to recycle old glass. Though its biggest supplier is a national company, the recycler accepts glass from many smaller companies as well. Cornett says Shark Solutions has containers across North America for disposing of the windshields.
See the upcoming March/April issue of AGRR magazine to learn how shops handle windshield recycling.
