Old glassbottles can be valuable… in more ways than one

Old glass bottles are a problem. They litter streets and clog rubbish dumps. Udit Singhal was 16 when he became curious about what happened to them in India’s capital New Delhi. 

“Bottles … were starting to pile up at home and I was just curious as to why that was happening,” Udit, who’s now a student in London, told WoW! News. 

 A system where people collected bottles for money to recycle them had broken down. Bottles now ended up in the city’s growing trash mountains.

 That bothered Udit. Bottles were filling up dumps where they would take a million years to disappear. Surely, they were worth something?

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Two birds with one stone

That’s when his research turned up a little machine – and the answer to a completely different problem.

I’m sure you know glass is made of sand. But did you know that there’s a shortage of sand? We need it to make cement for building. People dig it out of rivers and beaches – doing terrible damage to wildlife.

The machine Udit found grinds glass into super sand – even better for making cement than sand from beaches. He started collecting bottles and turning them into sand to sell to construction companies.  

Bingo. Fewer bottles in dumps. And less damage to beaches. 

Look for solutions 

If you feel something’s not right, and would really like to change it, Udit has a word of advice: “Look to identify problems around you but instead of being bogged down by them it’s to try and think of how you can remedy them,” he says.

 “You can’t just wait for something to happen.”