Las Vegas Bars Recycle Glass Bottles Into Building Material
Las Vegas hotel Mandalay Bay recycled its glass bottles for local construction. Photo: Flickr/Curtis Cronn
Have you ever ordered a drink at a bar or restaurant and wondered what happened to the bottle it came in?
On the Las Vegas Strip, these bottles may end up as the facade for buildings when mixed with recycled cement, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The material is known as Green Stone, and currently 200,000 pounds of it are being applied to the headquarters of Realm of Design, which manufactures Green Stone.
The other key players are Luxor and Mandalay Bay, which provide glass bottles from their bars and restaurants, and Evergreen Recycling, which collects and transports the glass.
While Green Stone actually costs more to manufacture than raw building materials, it provides a reuse for glass bottles that would otherwise need to be landfilled or shipped to recycling centers in other states.
According to the Review-Journal, Evergreen Recycling hopes that finding a local demand for the material would increase the likelihood that a glass processing plant is built in the area.
One of the other advantages of this process is that the glass bottles are essentially downcycled into sand, so there’s not as much of a concern about the condition of the glass. While glass bottles can be recycled into new bottles in about a month, this process requires color separation and removal of any broken pieces, since you can’t make new clear glass bottles with brown or green glass. That places more responsibility on recyclers and collectors of the material.
It’s estimated that only 25 percent of glass is recycled in the U.S., and of that material 60 percent is downcycled instead of recycled into new glass bottles. A main obstacle toward increasing the amount of recycled glass is the availability of processing plants that will purchase the material from recycling programs.
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As of June 17th 2011 we have upgraded our comment system to use Facebook comments. The below comments are closed and are listed for historical purposes.
Trey Granger
posted on July 14th, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Another fun fact I just learned from Realm of Design: the new facility being built using recycled glass is being modeled after the mini castle on a Rolling Stones album.
Reginald Whibbey
posted on July 14th, 2010 at 7:23 pm
That’s great. Now we have to get to a point where it is less expensive to be green. Check out my site and tell me what you think.