26 oktober 2025
Glass Sustainability: Reuse
In this video, Angelica Rota explains the concept and process of reusing architectural glass. Reusing glass panels or entire insulating glass units (IGUs) avoids the energy-intensive melting process of recycling, reducing CO2 emissions and preserving the material's quality. The process involves harvesting glass from buildings through selective deconstruction, followed by a complex disassembly to separate the glass from frames and spacers, and a critical quality assessment to sort the glass by its reuse potential. Despite its environmental benefits, glass reuse faces significant challenges. The disassembly of IGUs is complex and time-consuming, the logistics of handling large, brittle panels are difficult, and there is a lack of a strong market for secondary glass. Furthermore, collaboration across the supply chain, supportive regulations, and further research on issues like non-destructive quality testing are needed to make glass reuse a more viable and widespread practice. The video was produced by the Open GLASSroom project. Special thanks to Angelica Rota for contributing to the Open GLASSroom OER collection. The creation of these resources has been (partially) funded by the ERASMUS+ grant program of the European Union under grant no. 2022-1-DE01-KA220-HED-000089750. Neither the European Commission nor the project's national funding agency DAAD are responsible for the content or liable for any losses or damage resulting of the use of these resources.