EHS Abrasives LLC

In 2008, 12.15 Million Tons of Glass were produced in the United State. A large percentage of this went into glass bottles.

In 2006, the United States produced over 38 Billion glass bottles.

Approximately 80% of the glass bottles produced are used as disposable containers for beer. Roughly 12% of bottles are used for wine and spirits. The remainder was used for other products such as fruit juice and tea.

The use of glass bottles and packaging in general is typically an afterthought for consumers. The average consumer uses over 700 disposable beverage containers per year.

In 2008, 2.81 Million Tons of Glass were recovered in recycling programs. The represents less than 30% of the Glass produced. The vast majority of glass bottles are discarded with the trash.

When glass is mixed with trash, it is trucked to landfills and buried. Between 8 and 10 million tons of glass are discarded each year.

Glass that makes into a recycling program can be easily processed into new products. Glass that is sorted by color can be melted down to make new bottles. Unfortunately, sorting by color is a labor intensive and costly process. Many communities have found the cost of recycling glass to be too high. They still operate recycling programs that recover glass, but take the dumpsters of glass bottles to landfills. Even worse, some communities such as Huntsville, AL, send recovered glass to an incinerator and then a landfill (
huntsville_residents_your_recy.html).

Our ability to discard trash and bury it in landfills continues to become more difficult. Each year, more and more landfills reach capacity and are closed. Despite this, few new landfills are opened as few communities want a landfill in their backyard. The statistics are staggering.

Landfills in Operation in the US:

The Future will require alternatives and solutions. It will become impossible to continue to bury everything we produce.

A New Density for Glass

Glass with mixed colors can be pulverized to make abrasive media and other products. Pulverizing the glass is a very efficient process only requiring a supply of glass from discarded bottles. What has been missing, up until now, is an efficient process for separating glass from other waste and cleaning the glass quickly, efficiently and thoroughly so it can be used in sand blasting applications. This technology now exists, and crushed glass can be produced in very large volumes.

Converting discarded glass bottles into new products will help divert millions of tons of waste from our landfills every year.

One of the most promising applications for scrap glass is as an abrasive blasting media. In this application, the color of the glass is unimportant, allowing the processing of mixed glass. This drastically reduces the cost and energy required to process the scrap glass into a usable product.

EHS pulverized glass is an effective abrasive blasting media, proven to be effective in a wide range of abrasive blasting applications.

EHS offers a safer option over traditional abrasive media. Many abrasives used today contain hazardous materials, such as crystalline silica and heavy metals. EHS Abrasives are made from recycled glass beverage bottles - the same bottles we use every day to carry our soda, beer, wine, tea, juice and other beverages.

EHS Abrasives contain no free crystalline silica and no heavy metals. The glass we use to make SunBlast was used as a beverage container before it was converted. The only difference between the "food safe" bottles and the EHS Abrasives are the glass is pulverized into small particles to create the abrasive media.

The result is a material that diverts waste from landfills and reuses the waste in an application where the glass is safer than traditional materials.