3.5 million glass bottles on the wall. 3.5 million glass bottles. Take one down, pass it around, and it might end up as cement in Yale’s Physical Sciences and Engineering Building under construction. Yale’s ongoing construction on upper Science Hill will feature 600,000 gross square feet for the School of Engineering and Applied Science and more. In accordance with Yale’s promise to achieve net-zero carbon emissions on campus by 2035 and zero actual carbon emissions by 2050, the development will include a thermal utilities plant that will produce energy for the facilities. But even if operations are sustained by on-site energy production, creating a building from raw materials is quite carbon-intensive. Instead, some of Yale’s building materials will use Pozzotive, an industrial filler made from recycled glass such as drink bottles — the equivalent of 3.5 million of them, to be precise, according to a slideshow used during a recent tour of the glass recycling facility. At the tour last month, organized by several students at Yale’s School of the Environment, a group of Yale affiliates explored Urban Mining Industries’s facility in Beacon Falls, Connecticut, where recycled glass is processed and turned into a powdery building material known as pozzolan. Concrete is an essential building material for modern-day structures. Standard concrete consists of aggregate like pebbles or gravel, sand, water and cement — the powdered binding agent, often confused with concrete, that gives concrete its integrity.
Recycling plant turns glass to cement that supports Yale construction
