Santa Cruz de Tenerife has installed its first transparent glass recycling container, giving residents a rather literal look at what happens after they throw a bottle into the green bin.
The initiative has been launched by the Ayuntamiento de Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Ecovidrio to tackle some of the common myths surrounding glass recycling.
For the first time, part of the container has been replaced with a transparent methacrylate panel, allowing people to see inside.
And yes, it’s glass.
The idea is to demonstrate that glass packaging collected through the green containers is kept within its own recycling circuit.
A few recycling myths to clear up
According to the latest studies cited by Ecovidrio, 36.3% of people surveyed incorrectly believe that different types of waste are mixed together in collection lorries.
Other common misconceptions include the belief that recycled products are poorer quality, held by 8.9% of respondents, that recycling destroys jobs, at 9.1%, and that recycling creates more pollution than producing a new container, at 8.8%.
The transparent container is intended to make the process a little easier to understand.
Santa Cruz mayor José Manuel Bermúdez said the initiative was designed to bring the recycling process closer to residents and show that glass containers placed in the green bins are managed separately.
Environmental Sustainability and Public Services councillor Carlos Tarife added that the container provides a visual way of showing that only glass packaging goes into the green container and that the material continues through its recycling process afterwards.
More than 2,600 tonnes collected in 2025
Santa Cruz residents recycled 2,603 tonnes of glass packaging during 2025.
That works out at around 12.3kg per person, or roughly 42 glass containers per resident.
The city currently has more than 1,067 green recycling containers.
And glass has one rather useful property when it comes to recycling. It can be recycled 100% and repeatedly without losing its quality.
According to the figures provided by Ecovidrio, the amount of glass recycled in Santa Cruz during 2025 helped avoid more than 1,500 tonnes of CO₂ emissions.
That’s roughly equivalent to taking more than 700 cars off the road for a year.
The recycling also saved more than 1,900 MWh of energy and avoided the extraction of more than 3,100 tonnes of raw materials from the environment.
Glass recycling in Spain
Ecovidrio has been operating in Spain since 1998 and specialises in the separate collection and recycling of glass packaging.
The organisation says its system is supported by almost 6,000 packaging companies and that around seven out of every ten glass containers in Spain are now recycled.
So the next time you drop a bottle into the green bin in Santa Cruz, there is now at least one container where you can actually see what happens inside.
Not quite as exciting as looking through the windows of a brewery, perhaps, but useful all the same.