Sort of. They mention that the grain size is important, and going through the recycling path of grinding up old bottles is more effective than just using the raw silica, so I think this is novel.

Its kinda frustrating because this is how we used to do it. Im just old enough that I lived in the pre plastic world. Plastic existed but it took off in the 80's. So the deposit on glass things made it expensive and it was heavy and you would have glass litter which is kinda dangerous. So plastic just took over because people did not want to pay the upfront cost and did not want the weight nor the breakage. It kinda drives me nuts though. I remember the last glass things I could get was 16oz coke bottles and then even they went away. That lasted into the 90's. I don't see any convenience today realistically in daily life from the 70's except for the microwave.

just because glass can be used in this way does not mean all glass must be recycled in this way. First, reuse systems aren't perfect. In Germany, apparently glass is directly re-used, but some must as a matter of course just break or become too degraded to continue to use. In Australia, we just don't have the systems necessary to reuse glass this way, but that still doesn't mean the most efficient reuse is the only acceptable option.

Glass jars aren't reused because of the infrastructure required to reuse them. The only glass I can think of which is reused outside of the point of sale are soda and beer bottles, and that is only usually at restaurants which will collect the bottles they use to ship back.

Outside of a massive sorting facility in every supermarket generating no value for the store owner, the only other way to ensure bottle reuse would be subscription delivery like milk used to be or hyper focused stores which only sell a few products like how grocery shopping used to be.

From what I understand, it's 5-15% and if it's by weight, then it's even less by volume.