First and foremost, we, the Irish nation, are very good at recycling our glass bottles and jars. We now have glass recycling rates of nearly 80%. Yet we are not so good at other materials. Very few Irish household collection systems will collect glass so you need to separate into the different types/colours and bring to your local bring center. We have a complete list of the 2,500 bring banks, bring centers and larger civic amenity sites through out Ireland on www.repak.ie.
Glass containers deposited from households into the bottle bank network are transported for recycling to the glass processing plant. For example with Rehab, their Recycle plant is based in Dublin, at Ballymount.
The Ballymount plant uses state-of-the-art technology to sort the glass by colour, remove all metal contaminants and crush it into small pieces known as cullet.
When a consignment of glass arrives at Ballymount, it undergoes an initial process of manual sorting to ensure that bottles and jars are divided by colour - green, brown and clear.
Metal objects such as cans, and bottle lids are then removed magnetically, before the glass is crushed into cullet.
The cullet then goes through a screening system so it can be sorted by size. Optical sorters fire lasers through the particles to ensure that they are glass. The machines remove other objects such as fragments of cups or plates.
This is a vital process - just one broken tea cup will result in a 25 tonne consignment of cullet being rejected.
Finally the glass is put through a suction system which removes lighter components such as labels and plastic lids.
The cullet is then ready to go to Quinn Glass, in Northern Ireland,where it is put in furnaces along with other raw materials such as soda ash and silica sand to produce new glass.
For every tonne of cullet added to the furnace, there are savings of the energy equivalent of 30 gallons of oil. Source: www.rehab.ie
When a consignment of glass arrives at Ballymount, it undergoes an initial process of manual sorting to ensure that bottles and jars are divided by colour - green, brown and clear.
Metal objects such as cans, and bottle lids are then removed magnetically, before the glass is crushed into cullet.
The cullet then goes through a screening system so it can be sorted by size. Optical sorters fire lasers through the particles to ensure that they are glass. The machines remove other objects such as fragments of cups or plates.
This is a vital process - just one broken tea cup will result in a 25 tonne consignment of cullet being rejected.
Finally the glass is put through a suction system which removes lighter components such as labels and plastic lids.
The cullet is then ready to go to Quinn Glass, in Northern Ireland,where it is put in furnaces along with other raw materials such as soda ash and silica sand to produce new glass.
For every tonne of cullet added to the furnace, there are savings of the energy equivalent of 30 gallons of oil. Source: www.rehab.ie
No comments:
Post a Comment