Smålands glassworks: a review of the recently published studies

Abstract

The historical contamination of Smålands glass industry by hazardous concentrations of different trace elements (such as Pb, As, Zn, Cd and others) is a fact that has been approved by many researchers. These studies covered the situation of the glassworks contamination from different angles. However, the recommended solution by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency is landfilling. Dumping these masses means, on the first hand, losing huge amounts of the Earth natural resources as wastes and, on the second hand,  losing any future opportunity of recycling or reusing due to mixing these masses with other hazardous wastes generated by different sectors. In this paper, we are trying to review and highlight the results obtained by some of the already published studies in this field to identify the gap and challenges of recycling or reusing options.