Glass Waste
What is 'Glass Waste' ?
The majority of waste glass is derived from food packaging, such as jars and bottles. The public are encouraged to recycle glass by either depositing the waste in bottle banks or using the doorstep collection service provided by the local council.
Why Recycle Glass?
Glass recycling saves energy because recycled glass can be processed at a lower temperature than blending new glass from raw materials. Also, recycled glass is usually closer to the bottle plants than the sources of potash, the most expensive component in glass bottles and jars.
What is Glass Composed of?
Glass is composed of sand and potash; bottle glass is made from readily available and inexpensive raw materials. To be competitive, recycled glass must maintain a price that competes with these abundant raw materials. Traded as flint (clear), amber (brown), emerald (green) or mixed color broken glass the value ranges from £?? and £?? pertonne delivered to a glass plant.
How is Glass Recycled?
Modern, high production bottle manufacturing requires very clean and uniform feedstock. Over the past decade there has been a growth in the glass benefaction sector. These are intermediate processors that receive glass from recycling operations and run it through a series of steps to remove any contaminants (rocks, ceramics, metal caps, etc.) and provide a uniform product to the bottle manufacturers. These preprocessors provide an excellent market for recycling operations that do not have the volume or ability to produce glass for direct mill delivery.
Glass beneficiation plants use sophisticated optical sorting machines to separate the glass into the three color types. They may also x-ray the glass to detect any rocks or ceramics which are then removed. Magnets and eddy current separators are used to removed magnetic and non-magnetic metal contamination from caps and lids. The end product is a uniformly sized load of ground glass that is free of contaminants readily acceptable by bottle manufacturers.
Glass Recycling Services that we offer to our customers
We are not able to process glass oursleves due to the imense difficulty with sorting and contaminent removal.
We do however transport and provide storage for waste glass that is to be recycled.
On behalf of our customers we collect bottle banks and also transport bulk waste glass to recycling plants.
What is the Value of Recycled Glass?
The price depends on the cleanliness and color of the recycled product. Clean flint cullet (another word for broken glass) is usually the most desirable form of recycled glass scrap. Mixed color broken glass with ceramics or stones mixed in it is the least desirable grade of cullet bringing the lowest price. Most recyclers will colour sort and break or crush and screen bottles before selling their product.
Other uses for Dirty/Mixed Glass
Lower grades of recycled glass that are too mixed or contaminated, may be used in concrete or in road paving material called "Glassphalt". In some areas where there is an overabundance of low grade glass it is used to cover over the rubbish in the land fill in place of sand. This is not truly recycling and it is hoped that better sorting technology will soon make this mixed material usable for glass production.
