Glass Recycling UK invests in colour sorting

The company has invested more than £1.2 million in three new colour separators for its Barnsley cullet sorting plant.

Company director Michael Durr said: "This significant investment in new technology keeps us at the forefront of glass reprocessing. We have had all colour separated glass longer than any other company in the UK and this equipment helps us to further improve the quality of the cullet we produce as well as increase our production throughput. "

Glass Recycling first installed glass colour enhancing equipment at the plant in July 2001, but this only extracted one colour of glass at a time. So material had to be put through the system three times, once for each colour: amber, clear and green.

The new colour machines separate all three colours at the same time. A spokesman for the company said: "This brings huge savings in time and throughput."

The machinery is particularly useful for mixed glass, such as that collected by Glass Recycling in domestic kerbside rounds, although it can be used to enhance contaminated batches of single-colour glass from bring banks.

The equipment will be capable of sorting 50,000 tonnes mixed glass every year with very little colour contamination – 0.5% in the case of clear glass.

Mr Durr said: "This new equipment will help us to significantly increase the amount of glass that is used for recycling because of the high degree of accuracy we can achieve when separating mixed glass into separate colours."