Here it is! “Recycle Glass Day!” Can you feel the excitement?

My adventures in glass recycling started in Atlanta and I’m returning to that visit to forecast the future.

The Mount McKinley of all glass piles that lay in the back lot when I visited
Strategic Materials (SMI) had a more seedy appearance than the cullet
piles, not quite so sparkly. According to Hazel Mobley, glass
specialist and our tour guide, this pile of old bottles of every color
has been accumulating for years in anticipation of the day when
technology would arrive to sort the muddled array of colored glass that
comes from co-mingled or single stream recycling where all colors of
glass end up in the same curbside recycle bin.

Until
now the barrier to co-mingling all color bottles has been the labor of
separating glass by color to be recycled back into new products of the
same color. The future is upon us and particularly at SMI as they
prepare to implement a new single-stream operation where all colors of
glass coming from one humongous heap will be sorted by machine.

Now you wonder, how does a machine sort a mountain of dirty old glass of all different colors?

By dropping it.

First
the glass, primarily from bottles, is broken, washed and placed on a
conveyor where it’s vibrated into a single layer moving along. At the
end, it drops off the conveyor into free fall. As glass pieces are
falling, they pass in front of scanners capturing the images at a rate
of 10,000 pieces per second. The scan is identifying a selected color
(e.g. looking for green, looking for clear, looking for amber, etc.).

At
the same time color is being scanned, a metal detector identifies metal
pieces and separates them out. The glass of the determined color is
selected and separated by a blast of compressed air. Other color pieces
continue on to be scanned and singled out by color in another drop.

My
description is quite simplified, but what I’m trying to tell is that
technology has arrived to make possible rapid glass recycling from a
single stream of multi color glass.

We have an ancient commodity
that is endlessly recyclable, trustworthy for health safety, and
beautiful enough to wear as jewels, and we’re throwing it away. How
silly we are.

The Glass Packaging Institute announces the winner
of the student YouTube Competition. University students enrolled in
packaging science fields participated. The submissions are terrific!
The winner is almost a tear jerker. You can watch it at http://www.gpi.org/recycleglassday/youtube/.

For a more in-depth explanation of the Morgensen glass sorting technology

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