Glass recycling, a more agile and efficient process thanks to PICVISA’s ECOGLASS equipment.

Glass recycling has a reputation as one of the more straightforward recycling processes – and in principle, it is, since glass can be melted down and reformed indefinitely without losing quality. In practice, the process depends on getting the sorting step right, because different types and colours of glass behave very differently once they reach the furnace.

What types of recycled glass are there?

Recycled glass is generally categorised by colour – clear, green and amber being the most common for container glass – because colour affects the final product a furnace can produce. Mixing colours limits what the resulting glass can be used for, which is why colour separation is one of the most important steps in glass recycling.

The glass recycling cycle

The cycle begins with collection, often through bottle banks or kerbside collection that may already separate glass by colour to some degree. From there, material moves to a processing facility where it's crushed, and contaminants – ceramics, stones, metal caps, other glass colours – need to be removed before the resulting cullet can be sent to a furnace for remelting into new glass products.

ECOGLASS, optical glass separation par excellence

This is where PICVISA's ECOGLASS equipment comes in – using optical sensors to sort crushed glass by colour and identify contaminants that would otherwise compromise the quality of the resulting cullet. The accuracy of this sorting step is what determines how much of the collected glass can actually go back into new glass products versus being downgraded to lower-value applications or lost to residue. A more agile and efficient glass recycling process, in practice, means a sorting step that gets this separation right consistently and at the throughput that modern recycling facilities require.

Discover ECOGLASS for glass sorting