Hello there and great week for everyone.

In a sustentator article on glass I read that it is 100% recyclable, there is no limit to the times you can recycle it. I pondered on that thought for a while… which glass quality allowed us recycle it as many times we wanted to?

Let us take, for example, paper. We can recycle it once and use it for our notepads, office printings, etc. We can recycle it again and use it for newspapers; and recycle it for a third time to obtain toilet paper. But it is up to there where we get with paper. Nevertheless, we can recycle glass over and over again…

Now, if we take into account the time our waste takes to degrade, paper is less painfull for the soil’s digestion of our wastes. Paper degrades within 2 or 3 months, but glass can take up to 4000 years to degrade entirely.

Thinking naturally, the fact that a substance is organic or inorganic answers the initial question. Glass is inorganic (silica sand mostly). Hence, Nature takes a lot of time in digesting it and we can use it several times. Paper is organic (coming from the our forests’ womb) and Nature makes and excellent job decomposing it, making the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen glucose atoms flow through the biosphere again; and so, the usage we can give to paper through several recycling processes is limited.

It is a challenge for us to start understanding our dynamics within waste generation. The Earthships are an amazing way of building houses reutilizing materials, designed by the architect Michael Reynolds.

I remember watching a spectacular documentary of this genius, artist and visionary in the 2010 Green Film Fest in Buenos Aires. The documentary is called “Garbage Warrior” and I finally found a link where you can watch it online. At the bottom of this sustentator article, you can watch the movie.

Good Vibes.

Brian Longstaff.-

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