Glass recycling has been made simpler in South Africa – from one less step when recycling glass – than many other countries around the world.
According to The Glass Recycling Company spokesperson CEO Shabeer Jhetam, locally waste glass, bottles and jars don’t need to be sorted by colour before being recycled anymore, “All colours of packaging glass are made from the same basic materials including sand, soda ash, limestone and ‘cullet’, this is the industry term for furnace-ready, broken pieces of recyclable glass.”
The recycled glass is then processed by a new method to produce new glass, it is optical sorting which uses a high-resolution camera system. It is able to recognise a wide colour spectrum, to separate waste glass shards according to colour. This speeds up the process considerably and the more cullet which is used in the production, the less energy is used in the furnace and reduces CO2 emissions, Jhetam added.
Jhetam explained that for cullet to be useful it must be free from any impurities and sorted according to colour which can be done by the local technology to sort glass particles that are as small as 6 to 50mm in size.
Commenting on the efforts of glass manufacturers regarding the colour separation of glass recycling, Jhetam said glass manufacturers have invested over R600 million in establishing, maintaining and upgrading automated glass sorting and processing plants.
The technology will make recycling easier for consumers as they won’t need to separate glass by colour before it can be recycled. Jhetam noted, “This technology also makes it significantly easier for the curb-side waste collectors, who do not have to separate the glass themselves before selling it to a buy-back centre.”
With the changes, glass processing plants would need to adapt. There will be a need to remove three separate glass banks at recycling centres because all glass can be deposited into one glass bank.
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https://northeasterntribune.co.za/227123/importance-recycling-towards-cleaner-planet/
https://northeasterntribune.co.za/241244/school-adopts-recycling-project/
