Glass
Every time you put a glass container in a bottle bank or kerbside box you make a difference. You see, if you hadn"t recycled that bottle or jar, it would have been dumped at a landfill site and never used again. However, thanks to your efforts it"s now in the recycling stream, which means that instead of being wasted it will replace raw material when a new bottle or road is being made, and save space at a land fill site. Well done! Glass is 100% recyclable, that"s why when we reprocess your glass bottles and jars, we don"t waste any. After your glass bottle or jar is collected by the recycling vehicle, it is brought to a reprocessing plant. Recresco have three of these, located in Southampton, Nottingham and also in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire. The glass arrives in Lorries that carry up to 29 tonnes at a time. Every lorry that brings recyclate to the site is weighed and the information entered onto a computer system. This way we can tell your Local Authority how much glass has been recycled in your area. Once the Lorry has tipped its load in our storage bay, and when we have enough of one colour glass, we put the pile through the processing plant. The glass is picked up using a large loading shovel, and then tipped into the primary sort hopper. The glass is now carried on conveyor belts and vibratory feeders to the different parts of the processing plant to be cleaned.
We have to remove anything that isn`t glass. So no Paper, Bottle tops, Cans, Plastic Bottles, Plastic Bags, Stones or Ceramic Cups or Plates are allowed in the finished Glass Cullet. This is because when we send the Glass Cullet to the Glass Bottle manufacturers they put it straight into the furnace to be melted and made into new Bottles and Jars. If we leave any of the contaminates mentioned above in the Glass, they will appear embedded into a finished bottle at the factory. If the glass is delivered to our plant with all the colours mixed together, we separate the colours using very expensive hi-tech optical sorting equipment that can sort 10 tonnes every hour. Recresco currently has 18 of these machines. Recresco use only the very latest glass sorting technology, some of which we design and build ourselves. The glass cullet we produce is of such high quality that the Glass Bottle manufactures can use a much higher percentage of our material than they normally would.