With its international year, glass wants to move towards a carbon-free future
Unesco inaugurates on February 10 the year 2022 as the year of glass.
(Illustrative image).
Getty Images - Luis Diaz Devesa
Text by: Léopold Picot Follow
8 mins
Containing, magnifying, decorating, illuminating, glass is intrinsically linked to technical progress.
To celebrate, Unesco has declared 2022 "year of glass", whose inauguration ceremony takes place this Thursday, February 10 in Genoa.
While the energy and ecological transition is the great challenge of our century, glass could be a major asset... provided that it becomes totally virtuous.
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Look around you, and think about the glasses around you.
The first, the most visible, are those whose surfaces reflect you.
The window to your left, the screen on which you are reading this article, the glass of your camera, that of your bottle...
Your glasses, on the other hand, are no longer made of glass, while other glasses accompany you, without necessarily knowing it.
Are you under artificial light?
Don't forget that the bulb that gives you light is made of glass.
In your walls, to protect you from the temperatures?
Glass wool.
The fast internet connection to read this article?
Fiber optics, sometimes plastic, especially glass.
And this even in your teeth since some toothpastes contain bioglass microbeads to diffuse fluoride and strengthen your enamel.
2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣International Year of Glass!
🌎The UN General Assembly has declared 2022 the "International Year of Glass"!
The United Nations have thus recalled that glass is precious for sustainable development.
💦#Glass #ChooseGlass #IYOG #IYOG2022 #OcConsigne pic.twitter.com/bKCcA2Qchw
— Oc'Consigne (@OcConsigne) February 4, 2022
So when the UN and Unesco agreed to recognize this omnipresence by
celebrating the International Year of Glass
, Emmanuelle Gouillart, scientific director of the "Glass surface and interface" laboratory at Saint-Gobain Research, could only be delighted. .
“
Glass is an absolutely magnificent material, we are used to it in our daily lives, but it has accompanied the history of humanity.
Galileo would not have made these discoveries without the glass in his telescope!
“, she recalls with passion, a smile on her lips.
A story far from over: glass could be a key asset in the fight against ecological imbalances.
Heat up without losing a joule
Worldwide, the building sector, from construction to use, releases
38% of greenhouse gases (GHGs)
, a large part of which is linked to the energy spent on heating and cooling buildings. .
Glass saves this energy by renovating buildings that lose heat unnecessarily.
To insulate them effectively, glass is omnipresent, from the panes to the glass wool in the walls.
The sector innovates a lot, according to Emmanuelle Gouillart: "
We still often associate glass with a cold wall, but you should know that the new generations of double glazing have coatings that have a mirror function for heat, so that the heat of the room stays inside.
In cold countries, some triple glazing even has the thermal performance of a well-insulated wall and double glazing has a wall with average insulation.
An employee standing near a glass wool in the Saint-Gobain Isover factory in Chemille, western France, in 2010. AFP - JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER
In the future, as glass releases fewer GHGs than cement, it could be wise to develop, as needed, lightweight walls covered with a glass veil.
“
These are glass fabrics that can be used in exterior insulation solutions in connection with lightweight construction.
Rather than putting a big concrete facade, we're going to put plasterboard, with glass veils on top.
We are therefore changing the paradigm of construction: it uses less material, less cement
”, describes the specialist.
In addition to construction, glass is and will also be used to produce energy in other ways.
It is used in solar panels, of course, but also in wind turbines: fiberglass, which combines resin with glass, makes it possible to lighten the blades of wind turbines and improve yields.
It can also be used to reduce the use of plastic by being used as a container.
Discarded in nature, it will be considered an inert material and will not be ingested by wildlife.
Decarbonize glassware
Glass is a partner of choice for making an ecological and energy transition, while being a player in technological progress.
But producing glass means producing GHGs.
Throughout its chain, from the extraction of its sand to its end of life, glass pollutes, even if it is not the worst student in the family of materials.
“
For one kilo of glass, we produce 600 g of CO2.
It is 600 too many, of course, and to be eliminated by 2050, but cement is 900 grams, steel, a little less than 2 kilos, plastic, one to three kilos
”, nuance Emmanuelle Gouillart , before adding, “
When we replace glazing that is not very efficient, during the life of the new glazing, we will save eight times the CO2 that we consumed in producing it.
»
Two men at work on February 6, 2012 in Albi, southwestern France, at Verrerie Ouvrière, a subsidiary of Saint Gobain.
(Illustrative image) AFP - PASCAL PAVANI
Still, glass still produces CO2.
To make glass, the raw material must be heated between 1,000 and 1,500 degrees, which requires a large input of energy.
Biogas, resulting in particular from agricultural waste and treatment plants, is eyed by the glass industry.
But there may not be enough for all of French industry, which is pushing glassmakers to also turn to hydrogen.
“
Hydrogen, when burned, produces water.
It's fantastic, but you have to produce it in a carbon-free way
,” warns the research director.
A condition that is still uncertain, even if the whole
European Union seems to want to take up
the issue.
Another solution, the total electrification of the stoves, which would therefore run without gas.
An innovation already developed for glass wool and which will also be developed for glazing glass, but not for several years: it will be a major technological breakthrough for the sector.
Recycle glass as easily as a bottle?
The supply of raw materials is also an ecological issue.
When the question of a risk of sand shortage is posed, Emmanuelle Gouillart brushes it aside.
"
Issues of sand scarcity, sustainable sand management, are primarily of concern for concrete, much more so than for glass
."
However, recycling is a major issue for the industry: building windows, glass wool, smartphone screens are not recycled.
Unlike bottle glass, which is 97% recycled in France, other types of glass are often poorly or not at all recycled.
AFP - PHILIPPE HUGUEN
For Daniel Neuville, geomaterials specialist at the CNRS and one of the
promoters of the International Year of Glass
, this should change rapidly in the coming years.
“
The new law on Extended Producer Responsibilities (EPR) will come into force on January 1, 2023: it will then be necessary to recycle all the flat glass in the building, i.e. 200,000
tonnes.
The players in the sector must set up a recycling sector.
A first step before the following ones.
"
It's something that will develop for the years to come, but there is a whole sector to be put in place, a sorting, recycling and training sector for site professionals to identify the different products on site to do not mix them
“, confirms Emmanuelle Gouillart.
To recycle the glass of technological screens or fiberglass, the main problem is to separate the glass from the glues, the binder.
"
We have ideas, find organisms that would specifically eat the glues and leave the mineral part, but these glues, these glues, they have to be dissolved, use solvents: we come back to the problem of plastics
", sighs Daniel Neuville.
While waiting for a solution, in France, the fiberglass blades of end-of-life wind turbines are therefore stored, unlike in the United States, where they are buried.
The amount of work to be done to achieve transitions in the industry is enormous, Emmanuelle Gouillart is well aware of this.
“
That ticking clock in our head warns us not to waste time.
We must improve the processes that already exist and do ambitious R&D
[Research and development, editor’s note]
, which collaborates with academic research to make the transition to 2050 a success
,” she asserts.
With the hope that the International Year of Glass in 2022 will allow the general public and public authorities to become aware of the risks and the hopes carried by the material.
►Also read: One Ocean Summit, an agreement to limit plastic pollution of the oceans
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