Working with Recycled Glass
There is a lot of glass out there - used once and thrown away. Perhaps it was lovingly passed around a table of friends, used to pour out a complex wine, or covered in fingerprints as pickles from the summer harvest are enjoyed through the fall months. These vessels deserve to live on and not languish in a land fill.
Recycled glass isn't the easiest to work with. Because the origins - or chemical composition - aren't known, the glass isn't stable with other glass. When the glass heats and expands and cools and shrinks. Each does so at different rates. Firing and annealing the glass requires greater care.
The colors, while interesting, tend towards the dull. And sometimes the firing and annealing processes used to ensure stability turn the glass opaque. My experiments with recycled glass fall into several categories:
- Tiles Recycled glass makes spectacular tiles. First I grind the bottles in a cement mixer to break them into pieces. The resulting "tumbled" glass
is graded through screens to collected pieces of similar size. These are then melted into forms or "dammed" to create the tiles.
While it is possible to form tiles directly from the kiln. The most pleasing effects require "cold work", or grinding and polishing, after the tiles are removed from the kiln. The end result can be very similar marble or granite.
- Globes for light fixtures Bottles can be cut into pieces, melted flat, and seamed together to create very interesting patterns for a light. I'm in the process of creating a series of these in collaboration with a welder. Some of the olive wine bottles are absolutely beautiful. Stay tuned for pictures of the finished product.
