Portland-Based Second Glass Creates Shower Doors and More from Recycled Windshields
Mar 13th, 2009 | By Editor | Category: Industry News
Several years ago, Ron Sundholm, president and founder of Second Glass in Portland, Ore., was getting his own windshield replaced when he wandered out behind the shop to the dumpster where his broken windshield was headed.”I looked in the dumpster and I wondered, what do they do with these?” he recalls. “I thought, this can’t be happening, and then I thought of a lot of different applications. That was back in 2000.”
Afterwards, Sundholm developed his own process for recycling windshields using a cold formula. (He could not provide any details on the process, which currently is patent-pending.) After recycling the windshields, Sundholm turns them into a variety of products, including shower enclosures, office walls, dividers and more.
“Architects just go nuts [over this stuff],” he says, noting that homes and buildings that contain these products earn additional Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design points. In the end, the products are 90 percent recycled.
Sundholm gets broken windshields from four different local glass shops, though he hopes to expand to 20 locations of his own-which would require more glass “donors”-in the next five years.
“It’s just a matter of getting the funding to go to other metropolitan areas,” he says. Sundholm hopes to receive the official patent for his recycling process within six to nine months.
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I have a patent on reclaiming flat commercial glass without heat, we should chat as we probably have a lot in common.
Cheers
Rick
Hello,
How can a residential consumer get more information about your shower inclosures?
Krista S.
Reading your story about how you came across them in a dumpster is nearly identical to my search for a windshield recycling solution that led me here to begin with….I would like to be your first franchise.
For more information visit our web site . http://www.Secondglass.net or e-mail to, ron@secondglass.net Thank you for your interest.
Excellent recyling , need mass flow of this technology so that society can be benifited ,
Francisee/or technology tie-up is best method to make it possible