The Step by Step Process of Recycling Glass

According to Earth911.com, glass containers can take as long as a million years to decompose. Fortunately, glass is an excellent candidate for recycling. Its recycling cycle--time from trash collection to store shelf---is as brief as one month. Even when repeatedly recycled, glass will not degrade in quality. Glass recycling has obvious, immediate payoffs in resources saved, not only in raw materials like sand and limestone but also fossil fuels. It thus reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Because of its relative ease, environmental benefits and many marketable end products, glass recycling has increased in many countries.

Things You'll Need

• Recycling bins
• Pickup vehicle
• Sorting machine
• Crushing machine
• High temperature furnace
• Equipment to reform recycled glass into desired end products

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Instructions

• 1

  Collect glass containers from pickup points, such as bins set out at private homes, apartment buildings, schools and businesses. Transport to the glass recycling plant. You can also have an option for consumers to drop off recyclables at the plant itself.

• 2

  Even if consumers have done some sorting of the glass according to color and type, make sure the containers get mechanically and visually sorted into uncontaminated streams. Also remove non-glass contaminants. You can, for example, take out metal lids with magnets.

• 3

  Put the glass containers through a crushing machine. The crushed glass is referred to as cullet. Its quality varies according to the quality of the overall sorting process.

• 4

  Melt the cullet in a furnace that can reach up to 2700 degrees. At this temperature, any remaining paper labels will burn up completely. Much of the energy savings realized from glass recycling come from the fact that cullet melts at a lower temperature than sand and other raw materials for completely new glass.

• 5

  Reform the molten cullet into the desired end products. There are many possibilities, including bottles, tiles, industrial abrasives, fluxes for metal foundries, replacement for eroded beach sand and a roadbed material called Glassphalt.