At the plant, glass waste is unloaded by the collection trucks and deposited in a hopper which will lead it along a conveyor belt to separate small foreign bodies. The first stage has a magnetic sorter for eliminating metal or aluminium waste. Then, the sifting and crushing process begins and it is here that the first pieces of cullet appear.
After that, a suction pump eliminates light items, such as paper or plastic bags. Manual triage is another crucial stage because larger elements can be removed from the conveyors. Further on, the glass container waste goes through an optical sorting machine which sorts the empties by colour. After this and a last crushing process, the cullet is ready to return to the furnace and be turned into new glass containers.
Recycled glass becomes the main raw material to feed the new container production cycles without losing its intrinsic properties and is repeated an infinite number of times. All the containers citizens place in the green bin are acquired, after treatment, by the glass industry to make new containers.
Thus, a perfect circle is closed with virtuous consequences for the environment: quality recycling that significantly reduces natural raw materials consumption, protecting our biodiversity. Moreover, it minimizes the emissions associated with the process of manufacturing new containers, in comparison with the emissions from production with raw materials alone.
