BUSINESS/ENVIRONMENT
Sydney Mainster had a recycling problem. As VP of sustainability and design management at a large New York City real estate group, she was looking at the firm’s planned move across Manhattan and trying to be as sustainable as possible. To do that, she’d have to contend with hundreds of panes of glass.
For the past decade, the Durst Organisation, which oversees 1.2 million square metres of property in NYC, has tried recycling plate glass, the massive panes of laminated glass used in commercial and residential buildings. It’s easier said than done. The pieces have to be carefully removed and hauled down elevators, and then workers have to delaminate them by hand with a razor — a risky, costly and time-consuming task. That’s one reason almost 11 million tonnes of flat building glass ends up in landfill every year.
Whenever you add manual labour to a construction project, costs also add up, says Mainster. And because the typical process was too expensive, Durst wasn’t able to achieve the holy grail solution: turning the glass into a new glass product. Currently, the company recycles 80% of its construction waste.
But then she received an email from Patrick Elmore, president of business development for Infinite Recycled Technologies, and also a self-confessed “glass nerd”. Someone at Saint-Gobain North America, which supplies construction materials to Durst, suggested he contact Mainster.
Infinite Recycled Technologies had invented a machine that separates the laminated glass panels found in car windshields and on large buildings, removing the metal frame and plastic layer from glass panes in less than a minute and recycling every part of the product.
This family company, based in Minnesota, has become an unlikely pioneer in different kinds of recycling. Its parent company, Watson Recycling, is a family business that got its start in 1882, when the Mayo Clinic was founded in Minnesota. Jeremiah Watson was hired by Mayo to be town scavenger; he’d take a horse and buggy around southern Minnesota collecting garbage, and would separate out useful material when he discarded refuse at the town dump.
In the decades following, Watson and his descendants ran sanitation and disposal companies and would eventually commercialise more and more ways to reuse and recycle waste. In the 1970s, the firm started kerbside pickup for businesses, and continued to expand, finding a second life for metals, construction waste, and glass, and then building out new plants.
“Back in 2020, we were doing work for a glass fabricator in our area, and learned that laminated glass was being landfilled all across the country,” says Elmore. “Nobody was recycling it, so we came up with a solution.”
Durst utilised Infinite’s recycling process when it made the move in June, and plans on using it for future projects. The glass from the Durst office was turned into raw materials that Saint-Gobain turned into fibreglass; using the recycled glass meant cutting the amount of raw material needed for insulation by 35%.
Mainster wants the process to be standard for every interior demolition and any time exterior glass gets retrofitted, and she’s trying to convince peers at other NYC firms to do the same. Infinite has also expanded the service to other locations, including New York, and plans to expand further in the next year.
The massive volume of plate glass that gets tossed annually by the construction and real estate industries is part of the significant problem of construction demolition waste. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates the country produces at least 540 million tonnes of construction demolition waste annually; that’s literally double the amount of solid waste collected by every city in the US. Roughly 75% gets ground up into aggregate and fill, but only a small share gets reused, meaning the industry constantly needs new material.
Melting the glass directly in order to make new panes of glass is more complex and costly than one might anticipate, says Dennis Wilson, vice president of ESG for Saint-Gobain, which is why the focus is on fibreglass. Much of it is temperature-treated, and melting down and reheating the raw materials to make new panes would require a lot of energy. Turning the glass into fibreglass is an achievable step toward reusing more building waste.
“We’re fighting against 150 years of an optimised supply chain that puts this stuff in a landfill,” Wilson says. “It takes a lot of work to break that and build the new business models that get you to a place where you can reuse it.”
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