Mitigating environmental impact of waste glass materials: review of the existing reclamation options and future outlook

The environmental impact of waste glass (WG) is one of the major challenges crippling sustainable waste management and mitigation. Reclamation of recycled materials from waste glass remains a tedious task amidst complex technological approaches. The challenge as seen in the global containment measures increase the proportion of waste glass and minimize the existing capacity of landfill space. In many works, findings have shown how best to minimize the impact of waste glass as evidenced in their inclusion as building materials such as cement, mortars, concretes and blocks. The concept of this paper is to appraise previous studies carried out on the use of waste glass as key contributing factor in structural building. The scope of this paper will be broaden to include various successes recorded in the evolution of concrete mixtures containing different proportion of recycle glass. Part of the setbacks noted in the inclusion of these recycled materials as matrix, filler or fibre are also reported in this paper. Also discussed is the durability of glass materials in varying conglomerate involving cement in reinforcement of building and structures. Thermal insulating properties of recycled glass are also considered in this work where considerable energy is saved due to their low thermal conductivity. Based on the analysis of various studies and other factors considered in this paper, it is established that recycled glass materials can be accommodated in structural buildings, while continuous research is necessary to adapt waste glass to high pH value of Portland cement.