A planetary atlas of material flowsOpening this view…
Start with an everyday object or material.
Jump directly to a material, regional account or named facility.
From mineral ingredients to furnaces, bottles and jars. Follow glass through manufacture, collection, sorting and remelting.
Raw materials and recovered glass supply glassmaking. Different glass products can have incompatible compositions.
Not all glass is suitable for the same furnace feed.
Manufacturers form containers and other glass products. Reuse can extend a container’s life before material recovery.
Packaging and non-packaging products follow different systems.
Keeping glass separate prevents broken pieces contaminating paper and other streams.
Ceramics, drinking glasses and other products may not be accepted.
Recyclers remove unwanted material and prepare usable glass for its next market.
Contaminants and unusable fractions remain.
The BC program reports the geographic end market but does not identify every final factory or product in this snapshot.
A 100% BC allocation is not a 100% collection or recycling rate.
Explore the local operations and regional systems that collect, transform and recover this material.
Checking available records…
These figures concern Recycle BC’s packaging-and-paper program. Beverage-deposit systems have separate reporting and should not be silently combined.