The widespread use of persistent, non-biodegradable glass that cannot be naturally eliminated can cause long-term environmental hazards and social burdens.

While glass is widely recycled, and can be recycled indefinitely unlike plastic, much of it still ends up in landfill when recyclers find it too difficult or expensive to separate the material out from other materials.

According to Recycle Across America, “More than 28 billion glass bottles and jars end up in landfills every year — that is the equivalent of filling up two Empire State Buildings every three weeks.”

To solve this problem, a research group led by professor Yan Xuehai from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a family of eco-friendly glass of biological origin fabricated from biologically derived amino acids or peptides.

Traditional glass, such as commercial inorganic glass and poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) organic glass, is biologically...