Overview and Future Concerns for Recycling Glass Wastes

Glass materials possess unique functional characteristics of ceramics different from those of metals, which has marked glass as one of the mainstay materials in the history of mankind. Nowadays, industrial sophistication necessitates comparable "smart" attributes of glass materials as a significantly advanced form of sophistication. Smart glasses are increasingly applied in many state-of-the-art digital appliances such as displays and semiconductors and waste is also expected to accumulate therefrom in the near future: More than 60,000 tons of smart glass wastes were reported as of 2012, for example. In the present paper, current status of domestic Korean smart glass industry and related recycling enterprise have been comprehensively investigated. Finally, Korean domestic smart glass recycling technology and its future prospect are also briefly presented.