Container glasses are produced by mixing silica sand as the main "glass-networking" component with other ingredients, such as sodium/potassium carbonates or nitrates as the "network modifying" components, carbonates of calcium and magnesium and also a little amount of alumina. The natural tendency is to replace Feldspar as well as Limestone powder that is also quite expensive, as desired by some medium sized glass producers, by an alternative material, such as BF slag. Moreover, there is another reason that the prices of most raw materials are increasing thereby justifying the use of some waste materials that could be explored to reduce the cost of glass production, without too much compromising the overall quality of the finished glass products. This is described in terns of compositional analysis of container glasses and BF slag in the first part of this article. In this, the second part, we deal with the compositional engineering of container glass compositions by BF slag vis-a-vis the cost optimisation.
