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02/17/2016 12:44:02 AM · #1 |
Check out these amazing photos from Israel.
In the Israeli town of Yeruham, located in the middle of the barren Negev desert, colorful mountains of glass reach 50 feet into the air. The Phoenicia Glass Works Ltd. factory, which both recycles old glass bottles and makes new ones from sand hauled in from the surrounding area, ends up producing thousands of defective bottles during production.
The imperfect bottles are ground up and tossed onto piles with the rest of the rejects, to be melted down later. Oded Bality, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Israeli photographer with the Associated Press, captured these otherworldly mounds of green, blue and brown shards which stretch the length of several soccer fields. |
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02/17/2016 01:37:16 AM · #2 |
Cool photos.... almost surreal in some of them. Thanks for sharing Robert!
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02/17/2016 03:13:39 PM · #3 |
Curious that a well-established business would experience that high a reject rate ...
When I was a kid we once visited some place in the eastern Sierras where there was a dome of black obsidian exposed through the topsoil, a true "mountain of glass." |
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02/17/2016 07:25:44 PM · #4 |
| That's amazing! But I'm with Paul - why do they have so many rejects??? |
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02/17/2016 07:41:14 PM · #5 |
How odd... are they maybe being too picky?
WOw.
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02/17/2016 08:30:22 PM · #6 |
May seem crazy to us, the most wasteful populace on earth...but it sure looks they are checking every bottle by hand for imperfections. And why shouldn't they? If a bottle has a tiny crack or air bubble in it, that means its very integrity is compromised, and it cannot be trusted to not split or break during shipping or while being handled by a shelf-stocker or end consumer (ie most of us). I bet anything that the reputation of that whole town rests on their glassware. So kudos to them on their rigorous QC standards.
I can't tell you how many canning jars I've discarded without ever using because I saw a hairline crack, and their QC didn't. And even then I've had jars that looked perfectly sound, just go and split on me, all thanks to a tiny fracture or air bubble trapped in the glass. If a flawed jar/bottle doesn't break during the initial heating/sterilizing period, or during 35+ min in a boiling water bath...then you are insanely lucky.
Message edited by author 2016-02-17 20:33:53. |
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02/19/2016 12:37:42 AM · #7 |
Those aren't rejects. That is glass that is going to be fed back into the furnace to make new glass products. Some of the newly made glass will use all recycled glass and some will be mixed in with new sand and other ingredients to make new glass. Just like how they recycle our cars, ships and other items of metal to create new products.
Glass is a 100% recyclable material... although like paper, once it gets to the toilet paper stage, it's pretty much washed up. :D
I've used float glass (window panes and glass table tops) and melted it down to make other stuff with. I've also flattened a lot of bottles and mason jars in my kiln. Most bottle glass is made from junk glass re-heated, melted and reformed.
Mike
Message edited by author 2016-02-19 00:38:36. |
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02/19/2016 12:48:09 AM · #8 |
Originally posted by snaffles:
I can't tell you how many canning jars I've discarded without ever using because I saw a hairline crack, and their QC didn't. And even then I've had jars that looked perfectly sound, just go and split on me, all thanks to a tiny fracture or air bubble trapped in the glass. If a flawed jar/bottle doesn't break during the initial heating/sterilizing period, or during 35+ min in a boiling water bath...then you are insanely lucky. |
It's not the heating itself that breaks the glass... it's how fast you go from cold or room temperature to hot and how fast you go from hot to room temperature or cold. Even with cracks and bubbles, you can usually heat glass up till the point it melts and reforms without it breaking... if you do it slow enough that you don't cause the glass to expand (it's actually stressing and un-stressing) faster than it can take.
Of course if there is a crack, it doesn't take much of a tap to cause the crack to run... like a crack in your windshield will start small and then start to run until it goes across your whole windshield. I've cut a lot of glass and that's how you break it... you score it, making a very fine scratch across the glass and then you can run that line and it will break cleanly along it. It's really fun watching the line run on a circle of glass. If you apply the right amount of pressure you can watch the line run all the way around the score line. But glass also has a mind of it's own and sometime there is a micro fracture you can't see and the line that is running will split off in a different direction than you intend. I hate it when it does that. :D
Mike |
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