vase recycling program

Humphreys Flowers strives to make every effort possible to contribute to the green effort. Our next step is to incorporate a vase recycling program into our company. This is where you, the consumer, can help out!

Why Recycle Vases?
• Glass is one of the few raw materials that can be recycled indefinitely, yet only about 22% of glass produced today is from recycled materials.

• Glass is produced from sand, lime and soda and uses 40% more power to produce raw materials than it does with recycled materials.

• Although not all glass is recyclable, it plays a small part of the amount of glass put into landfills. Americans alone throw away enough glass that could be recycled to fill a 1350 foot tower building in one week.

• The process of glass recycling is less extensive than the process of making it from raw materials. Once glass is picked up and taken to the recycle center it is separated by color and then broken into small pieces. The broken pieces are then crushed and sorted before being cleaned and added to raw materials to make the final glass product. Crushed glass melts at a lower temperature than the raw materials and therefore the more recycled material that is in the mixture the less energy it takes to melt the materials into glass.

By reusing vases for their original purpose, we are able to not only reduce waste but also the energy it would require to recycle the glass to be produced into something new.