The glass recycling process
Glass recycling is an extensive process. But few people know how many steps are involved. This is just one more reason for us to show you the individual steps of the process from the delivery of waste glass to the pre-sorting and main sorting of the cullet. After all, glass recycling is indispensable to our business and also an important contribution to the conservation of resources.
The raw cullet is delivered unprocessed and sorted by colour.
After the incoming glass inspection, the raw cullet is placed on the pre-sorting line by colour (flint, green and amber).
Coarse foreign substances such as plastic, cardboard, paper, wood, electronic waste, ceramics, porcelain or stones are first removed by hand. Whole bottles are crushed to pieces by a crusher.
Opposite the bar screening machines, breezers are installed on which light materials, such as film scraps, are sucked in and separated.
Overband magnets and magnetic drums are used to remove ferrous metals such as tin lids or cans.
Non-ferrous metals (aluminium, bottle caps, aluminium banderoles, etc.) are removed by the eddy current separator. Following these steps, the pre-sorted glass enters the fully automated pre-sorted glass store, from where the main sorting system is automatically fed with pre-sorted glass.
The pre-sorted glass is dried by fluidised bed dryers to prepare it for the main sorting process. Drying also causes the old labels to become brittle and peel off more easily. The cullet is screened into several size ranges. Residual light materials such as plastics, paper or wood are subsequently removed by suction channels and zigzag classifiers.
Optical sorting machines detect materials in several stages that would not melt in the glass furnaces. These include CSP (ceramic, stone and porcelain) as well as special and heat-resistant jars. Afterwards the cullet is sorted by colour.
The end product of this process chain is the final cullet – the basis for the new glass product. We store this cullet in the fully automated final cullet warehouse until it is further processed.
Everything from a single source
