His furnaces routinely hit temperatures of over 1,000 degrees centigrade, but master glassmaker Ian Hankey’s burning ambition tops even that. After 40 years in the business, he’s on a mission to transform the way the industry deals with waste glass – with a little help from cow burps and foraged bracken.
Glass is infinitely recycleable, but around half of household glass is churned into concrete or tipped into landfill. This is in spite of the consistently high demand for quality ‘cullet’ – waste glass.
The British Glass Confederation admits that there is a murky picture in glazing and construction glass. Chemical additives can complicate recycling processes, which means that a lot of this end of life material goes to waste.
Hankey, principal technician in Fab Lab at Plymouth College of Art has found a solution. Hankey combines glass-mixing skills gleaned through 17th-century texts with cutting edge technology and modern farming techniques.
His Community Interest Company (the Upcycled Glass Project – launched alongside academics and glassmaking colleagues – will initially target waste in and around his base in Devon. It got off the ground by raising £10,000 in a crowdfunding campaign.
Hankey isn’t open to sharing the secrets of his custom manufacturing process, but he does have clear intentions. He hopes the model can be replicated across the UK to transform old building glass that is destined for landfill into prized ‘art’ glass, currently imported into the UK at a cost of £2,500 a tonne.
“There are absolute mountains of this waste window glass, and nobody knows what to do with it,” said Hankey. “None of the big glass companies want to get involved because it’s just too costly.
“But glass is dead simple: it’s 70 per cent sand, about 20 per cent soda, which we get from plant ash, and the rest is stabilisers. I’m going to use waste glass as my starting point – my sand source – and refine it.”
Hankey has already had inquiries from businesses looking to supply him waste glass. “It’s cheaper for them to give it to me than to pay to dump it.”
Andy Bradford, a Dartmoor farmer, will help him source his plant ash. This is used to lower glass’ melting temperature. It will use bracken harvested from land around Brimpts Farm, also the site of the project’s furnace. Bracken was once used by master glassmakers from Italy.
The only waste that we should create is water.
A small-scale capture system will collect waste CO2 from production. Ultimately, Hankey hopes to power the furnace with methane from Brimpts’ cattle and their slurry. “At the end of it all, the only waste we create should be water,” he explained.
Hankey is looking for applications for his recycled glasses in art and design as well as renewable energy equipment and optics.
“The eventual goal is to replicate this up and down the country and have lots of us chipping away at the waste glass mountains: small businesses with a massive environmental impact.”
Main image: Ian Hankey blows hot glasses at Plymouth College of Art. Credit: Owen Richards
