Because glas is being used as a material or mass noun here, in a general sense.
So:
This is like English, where you also often say We recycle glass, not We recycle a glass.
If you were talking about a specific object, the wording would change:
Because the sentence is talking about glass as a material, not individual glass items.
So:
Both are possible, but they mean slightly different things.
Yes, herwin is a standard Afrikaans verb for recycle, especially in the sense of recovering or reprocessing materials.
It is built from:
So it has the idea of recovering something for use again.
Depending on context, Afrikaans may also use other recycling-related terms, but herwin is a very normal word here.
Yes. Herwin here is present tense.
Afrikaans verbs do not change much the way English verbs do. The same form is used with different subjects:
In a sentence like this, the present tense can mean:
So Ons herwin beslis glas most naturally means We definitely recycle glass as a general habit or policy.
Afrikaans usually uses double negation:
Notice the two nie words:
This is a very important Afrikaans pattern.
In this sentence, ons means we.
Afrikaans learners often notice that ons is a very useful word because it can also appear in other related meanings depending on context. But here it is simply the subject pronoun:
So the easiest way to understand it here is just we.
The neutral sentence is:
If you want to emphasize glas, Afrikaans can sometimes use stress in speech rather than changing the word order much.
Word order in Afrikaans is less flexible than in English in ordinary main clauses because the finite verb still wants to stay in second position. So for a learner, the safest natural pattern is still:
That is the best default sentence to use.
A rough English-friendly guide:
A few notes:
So glas does not sound exactly like English glass. The first sound is made farther back in the throat.