Doosan wheel loaders are helping GlassWRX divert landfill-bound glass
October 28, 2021
GlassWRX, an advanced technology and materials science company, is working hard to change the fact that 85 percent of all U.S. post-consumer glass ultimately ends up in landfills. Launched in early 2020, the Beaufort, South Carolina-based company's vision is a "world without waste." They take post-consumer soda-lime glass from local landfills and run it through a kilning process to create an innovative media called engineered cellular magmatic (ECM), which has many industrial applications in resilient infrastructure.
"You could say the starting point was foam glass technology, which has been around since the 1930s," explains Brad Graham, national director of site implementation at GlassWRX. "But then our founders and scientists took it to a whole new level. While ECMs are nearly 100 percent glass, they act and react nothing like the glass people expect."
According to GlassWRX, ECMs can make better, far longer-lasting and more eco-friendly concretes, and can be used to create materials that are better at cleaning polluted air and treating water. ECMs are also restorative and regenerative by design and can clean contaminated sites, or even remediate decades of nutrient and chemical pollution from the earth.
Thanks to an on-site ECM lab and test kiln, GlassWRX can also adjust inputs, cellular size, temperature and surface chemistry to custom-engineer ECMs to a customer's unique needs and specifications, whether that be in resilient construction, or for blue-green sustainable infrastructure.