Poraver Takes Garbage Glass and Turns It Into Useful Stuff
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 06.13.08
No, that's not a total eclipse; it's a tiny little ball of expanded glass cooking at 900 Degrees C. People in Ontario go to a lot of trouble to separate out their bottles for recycling, but most coloured glass can't be made into new products, and ends up in landfills or road beds. Poraver built a plant in Innisfil, Ontario that takes that glass and grinds it up to a powder, mixes it with water and expanding agents, and sticks it in a furnace. The result: tiny white lightweight balls that can be used in a wide range of construction products, from insulating boards, to mortar, plasters, and concrete blocks.
It has been around for a while in Europe, and has been used in precast panels, insulating blocks and some really cheesy monster houses.
as plaster images copyright Poraver
as insulating block and insulating mortar
as facade panels
as loose fill insulation.
Conceptually it is almost the perfect green product: take an essentially useless product out of the landfill stream, and turn it into a fireproof, insulating, completely inert and non-toxic building product that replaces sand in concrete blocks. You can even mix it into the mortar, eliminating the thermal bridge that usually occurs when one uses insulating block. About the only downside I can think of is the amount of natural gas used to heat that furnace, which is probably considerable.
Making it into Block
Just up the highway from the Poraver plant, Atlas Block is casting Poraver into its new PCR block, which are noise and heat insulating, and rack up the LEED credits for being over 30% post consumer recycled.
This is the kind of creative use of materials that is so important if we are going to make buildings that work on a carbon-reduced diet: Take landfill-bound waste and turn it into a value-added replacement for stuff that is dug out of the ground. We hope it catches on.
Two examples of how NOT to use the web: Atlas Block sends out a lovely brochure, but all they have on the net is a PDF copy of it. Poraver paid some designer a lot of money to create a flash-crazy, hard to navigate site with scrolling windows and annoying music.translated the really annoying German site. Lots of information though, if you can find it. ::Poraver
Why can't coloured glass be recycled into more coloured glass? e.g. for beer bottles, which are usually brown anyway.
This is a nice example of reuse. But this is not recycling. The glass is just being discarded when the building materials are disposed of. Glass in a concrete block is nearly impossible to reuse/recycle. The garbage glass is still going to into the garbage, just delayed by the life span of a building.
Hopefully, this idea displaces the mining of all raw building materials. At least there is a small benefit. But continual reuse with cradle to cradle design is the only way to go.
The biggest problem is the variation in glass types and colors available. Most stardard glass recycling deals with bottle glass (according to many sources, this is as much as 80% of the glass in the waste stream), and the standard recycling center deals only with it. Flat glass is the second biggest portion of the waste stream but cannot be recycling in the same way as bottle glass - mainly because of the coatings used in double-glazing and auto glass. Then, you have the rest of the glass categories ... fiberglass, pyrex, lead crystal, decorative glass, et al ... and items like lightbulbs, TVs, monitors, and other appliances that have glass as a part of their compoments. All of these last types cannot be sent thru the standard recycling stream b/c of various factors and if they make their way thru it, they produce sub-standard cullet for reuse.
For more information on glass recycling (specifically, in the UK), see:
http://www.glassrecycle.co.uk/
http://www.wasteonline.org.uk/resources/InformationSheets/Glass.htm
Coloured glass can and is used in manufacturing new containers such as beer and wine bottles. The issue in recycling coloured glass becomes an technical one. The smaller the fraction the harder it becomes for optical sortation to detect the colour thus creating waste glass. Manufacturers using recycled glass have very tight specifications and have no way of dealing with ceramic, aluminum, metal and organic content found in the galss waste stream. It is this glass waste stream that Poraver uses in their production and have the know how of dealing with such contamination.
As for the comment on cradle to cradle design I would like to note that Poraver may have been used traditionally in cementitious applications but the products attributes and versatility opens the door to multiple applications. If you visit www.wilhelmi.de you will find a ceiling tile made of 100% Poraver bound by sodium sillicate. This product can be recycled 100% to make new Poraver beads. This cealing tile will be manufactured in North America withnin one year by InterACT Ceilings and you can see them at www.interactceilings.com. They currently manufacture a gypsum based tile utilizing Poraver in their formula but the flat panel will create a paradigm shift in the market. Imagine a flat panel or tile that does not contribute to sick building syndrome, no smoke or fire contribution, no sag in high humidity, a .75 noice reduction coefficient, and so on and so on.
Visit www.biorem.biz a Canadian company that manufactures filters utilizing Poraver used in eliminating odors. A concept that is really taking off.
Poraver by Dennert publishes a semi annual magazine called IDEA that is worth flipping through for all interested in seeing the new products being launched that are Poraver enhanced.