Glass Recycling
Content
- What we do
- Where to find our recycling sites
- What can be recycled?
- Right stuff, right bin, right place
Currently, we do not collect glass from the kerbside. However, we still actively encourage our residents to recycle their bottles and jars at one of our recycling sites.
At these recycling sites you can separate glass by colour by placing them in designated glass recycling banks. The different glass colours are separated so they can become another jar or bottle.
Where to find our recycling sites
Our sites are located throughout the borough at convenient locations. Find your nearest site.
What can be recycled?
Jars and bottles. Your jars and bottles are 100% recyclable and can be recycled an infinite amount of times.
Right stuff, right bin, right place
What happens to your glass bottles and jars?
Glass is a commodity, and can be recycled over and over again, so what happens on the recycling journey?
Your colour sorted glass collected from our bottle banks are transported to our depot for onward transfer to one of the country’s lead glass recycler at the processing plant at Knottingley in South Yorkshire.
Recycling one bottle will power a 100 watt light bulb for almost an hour or a computer for 20 minutes.
The first stage of sorting once in the treatment plant is the removal of contaminations. The glass bottles and jars undergo a number of processes to remove unwanted items such as any other types of glass which are not bottle glass, this includes Pyrex and flat glass and lead crystal glass. Bottle caps are also removed for recycling with magnets before the material passes into an enclosed chamber, where blown air is used to remove large lightweight objects such as paper, plastic bottles, and plastic jar lids. The material is then fed into a vertical dryer, this draws hot air up though the glass as it enters the dryer, this flow of hot air will remove the moisture as well as glass dust and paper labels which have been freed from the bottles and jars during this process. The now dry and clean glass passes over an Eddy Current separator to remove aluminium before it is transported to the sorting machines.
The material that is fed into the sorting machines is illuminated from below and above with different types of light, the high definition cameras inside the machines, scan the images of each colour of glass and detect the red, green and blue spectrum. Where the computer detects a piece of contamination it then sends a signal to the high speed, high accuracy compressed air jets to fire and eject the contamination from the flow of glass.
The glass at this stage is now known as cullet, is free from contamination.
The final stage of the process is to crush the material to size before it is sampled and tested to ensure that it meets the required specifications. This material is then supplied to bottle and jar manufacturers who make new bottles and jars from the finished, high quality cullet.
This type of recycling is known as 'Closed Loop' system, where waste material is turned back into its original form. In the case of glass bottles and jars this loop can be repeated over and over again, forever!