https://www.mdu.se/

Float glass is a versatile and ubiquitous material, used for the most part in construction but also in vehicles. Contrary to container glass, float glass often follows linear flows and is landfilled when reaching end-of-life. This is certainly the case in Sweden where 35 000 tons of windows are landfilled every year. Ragn-Sells has recently started operating a post-consumer recycling facility in Örebro, meant to remediate this environmental issue but is facing difficulties in ramping up its operations due to the lack of input material in the form of discarded windows. An assessment of the float glass value chain was performed, with focus on the interactions between the different actors, their main sustainability focus and incentives, as well as what they see as blockers and opportunities to the further deployment of float glass recycling. Additionally, avoided emissions calculations were performed to evaluate the climate gains associated with the production of post-consumer cullet by Ragn-Sells and their inclusion in Saint-Gobain Glass’ float glass lines in Germany. Findings include that an increased-circularity scenario including 20% of post-consumer cullet and 30% of other recycled materials would yield a 11,3% decrease in embodied emission for the final float glass product compared with a 2019 baseline. Increments of 10 percentage points of post-consumer cullet give further 5 percentage-point decreases in carbon footprint and the comparison of a fully linear scenario to a fully circular one corresponds to climate gains of 52%. A calculator is provided to perform own comparisons of different scenarios with various ranges of transportation distances, energy carriers and ratios of different cullet types. Finally, recommendations are issued regarding good practices for climate data collection and sharing as well as for the use of the provided calculator and other circularity metrics with the aim of tracking and encouraging further deployment of float glass recycling.