New Zealand to Increase Glass Recycling By Color Sorting
Through a partnership with glass manufacturer Owens-Illinois, New Zealand recycler Vitsy is building a glass sorting plant next year that will separate bottles by color so more glass can be recovered for recycling, according to the New Zealand Herald.
The new plant will be able to differentiate between 17 million colors of glass and is “sensitive enough to tell a Heineken beer bottle from another green bottle.” It can handle 100,000 pieces of glass per minute, recognizing color for even the smallest of glass fragments.
For Vitsy, the new plant will be important because it currently has a stockpile of bottles (locally known as “Mt. Vitsy”) waiting to be sorted. Once these thousands of tons of glass are separated by color, they will be sent to the Owens-Illinois manufacturing plant in Penrose to make new glass bottles. This entire process may take as little as 30 days.
According to the EPA, 34.5 percent of glass beer and soft drink bottles and 28.1 percent of all glass containers were recycled in 2007 in the U.S. Photo: Wikimedia.org
When it comes to glass recycling, the main issue is separating bottles into the three primary colors: clear (or flint), brown (or amber) and green. Auckland currently offers single-stream recycling, meaning not only is all glass collected together, but it’s mixed with products such as paper and metal.
Unlike other beverage containers, glass can break during the sorting process and allow different colors to mix. New bottles can only be made from one color of glass, meaning any mixed cullet will be downcycled into material such as fiberglass or turned back into sand.
Green glass has more variety of shades than any other color, making it a popular color choice for glass bottles. Green glass is usually “colored” using metals like iron, chromium or copper.
But, you will most often find colorless glass in everyday places, such as the grocery store. Pasta sauce or peanut butter jars and some beer and spirits bottles use colorless glass as well.
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Bob Dyksterhouse
posted on August 26th, 2009 at 6:34 am
Why can’t new bottles be made from mixed cullet? Are there any bottled products in the market that use mixed cullet? I would personally love to buy a psychodelic-colored bottle of beer!
Laura Constant
posted on May 11th, 2010 at 7:22 pm
Wanting to see if there is any place in Illinois that would take colored glass?
Geoff Barnett
posted on April 17th, 2011 at 10:10 pm
We have had several meetings with O-I in New Zealand as transportable volume is a huge issue. You can only store appox 9 tonne of full bottles in a standrad shipping container and they require 20+ tonnes to cover the transport costs.
O-I had informed us that the bottles had to be sorted also however we have since spoken to VISY the beneficiation plant and they have optical sorting lines that sort glass particles larger than 8mm. It is obviously cheaper for O-I to not have to sort the glass if possible.
We are now working with a waste managment company to supply our compact glass bottle crushers to commercial waste generators and setup a collection service for the cullet to be transported back to VISY for sorting. This will reduce the costs for the waste generator and the comapny associated with the collection.
We are working on similar systems in Australia, Canada, USA, UK and also have systems more suited for areas that are too far from glass manufacturers allowing them to crush there glass to a reusable or easily disposable sand.
It is amazing how many misleading recycling systems are in place around the world at present.