Old Windshields Start Finding New Life

Just in case you haven’t noticed, an ongoing trend in American society is conservation. This means using less, recycling more, and being mindful of what you choose to purchase. The trend can be seen in everything to the resurgence of cloth diapers for babies to windmills supplying electrical power.

Conservation has also been a selling point to environmentally-minded consumers on windshield repair service. You could confidently tell someone that by having their windshield repaired instead of replaced, they were keeping 25 pounds of laminated glass out of their local landfill.

The reason that laminated glass was not recycled was because it is too costly to separate the glass from the poly-vinyl butyral, or PVB. It was simply cheaper to throw them away. Well now a company called JN Phillips Auto Glass has developed a technology that allows for more efficient recycling of windshields and has branded it the GreenShieldSM Windshield Recycling Program.

According to the JN Phillips website, the recycled PVB is used in industrial adhesive applications and the glass is used in fiberglass and even concrete blocks with more applications on the horizon.

So what does this mean to you, the windshield repair technician? Currently, the recycling service is not offered on a national basis. And just like the days when windshields could not be recycled, windshield repair is still less expensive, faster, and restores a windshield to its original strength.

So while the advantages of windshield repair over windshield replacement remain the same, the auto glass industry is changing. No longer will all 600-million pounds of windshields end up in landfills across the country every year. And that’s a good thing.