Cast Glass Components out of Recycled Glass: Potential and Limitations of Upgrading Waste to Load-bearing Structures

Although in theory glass can be endlessly remelted without loss in quality, in practice only a small percentage gets recycled, mainly by the packaging industry. Most of the discarded glass fails to pass the high quality standards of the prevailing glass industry -due to coatings, adhesives, other contaminants or incompatibility of the recipe-...

Structural cast glass components manufactured from waste glass: Diverting everyday discarded glass from the landfill to the building industry

Although in theory glass can be endlessly re-melted without loss in quality, in practice only a small percentage gets recycled, mainly by the packaging industry. Most of the discarded glass fails to pass the high quality standards of the prevailing glass industry – due to coatings, adhesives, other contaminants or incompatibility of the recipe –...

The effect of manufacturing flaws in the meso-structure of cast glass on the structural performance

The success of projects such as the Crystal Houses façade in Amsterdam has triggered an increasing interest from architects, engineers and glass producers in the development and application of structural cast glass components. This interest raises, simultaneously, the needs for a controlled manufacturing process, a system for quality control and...

Re^3 glass a reduce/reuse/recycle strategy

The applicability of glass in structures is continuously ascending, as the transparency and high compressive strength of the material render it the optimum choice for realizing diaphanous structural components that allow for light transmittance and space continuity. The fabrication boundaries of the material are constantly stretching: visible...

Recycled Glass Mixtures as Cast Glass Components for Structural Applications, Towards Sustainability

The problem of sustainability represents one of the most important issues that the world has to face nowadays, not only in terms of energy consumption and of the consequent CO2 emissions, but also in terms of material waste streams that end in landfill. 38 million tons of glass waste are produced every year in the European Union and new targets...

Investigating the flexural strength of recycled cast glass

Currently, tons of high quality commercial glass are down-cycled or landfilled due to contaminants that prevent close-loop recycling. Yet, this glass is potentially a valuable resource for casting robust and aesthetically unique building components. Exploring the potential of this idea, different types of non-recyclable silicate glasses are...

The Application of Waste Float Glass, Recycled in Structural Beams made with the Glass Casting Method

It is not obvious to talk about glass recycling when we realize that a mature recycling procedure for glass bottles is already working well. However, apart from glass bottles, unfortunately, that a large amount of glass will disappear into landfills. This large quantity of unrecycled glass indicates that there is a large potential in upgrading...

On the flexural strength and stiffness of cast glass

Cast glass has great potential for diverse load-bearing, architectural applications; through casting, volumetric glass components can be made that take full advantage of glass’s stated compressive strength. However, the lack of engineering, production and quality control standards for cast glass and the intertwined ambiguities over its...

Glass up-casting: a review on the current challenges in glass recycling and a novel approach for recycling “as-is” glass waste into volumetric glass components

This paper presents the casting of volumetric glass components from glass waste as an alternative glass-recycling approach. The approach is characterized by its flexibility to accommodate a variety of compositions and ability to yield volumetric (solid or thick-walled) glass products that can tolerate higher contamination rates without a...

Anatomy of cast glass: The effect of casting parameters on the meso-level structure and macro-level structural performance of cast glass components

Cast glass has great application potential in the architectural realm, yet, despite its possibilities and attractiveness, designers, engineers and developers are, from an early design stage, hesitant to employ it; the limited available and craft-based manufacturing facilities, the questionable quality of the product, the missing engineering data...