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The Path of a Recycled Bottle

Date
Jan, 05, 2016

By Kim Robson:
We all know recycling is critically important to the health of our planet. Rather than making new bottles glass bottlesfrom scratch, recycling glass bottles allows new bottles to be created with less energy and fewer new raw materials, which aids conservation and improves energy efficiency. But have you ever thought about the entire path a recycled bottle takes, from when it leaves your possession to when it’s cast into a new product? Let’s take a look at the life path of recycled glass:
Collection
Glass for recycling is collected from home and office recycling bins, redemption centers, beverage distributor co-ops, parking lot drop-off locations, and certain special events.
Sorting
At a “material recovery” facility (MRF), glass travels on a conveyor belt to rotating metal discs, which recycled glass bottlesbreak up the glass. Smaller bits fall through holes for separate collection, while larger pieces continue down the conveyor belt to a vibrating screen while being blown with high-powered gusts of air to remove any bits of paper, dirt and other detritus from the glass. In order for the glass to be reused for a new container, it also must be free of contaminants such as ceramic bits, light bulb glass, mirror glass and other recyclables. The crushed cleaned glass is called “cullet.”
Processing and Converting
Using an “optical sorter,” cleaned cullet is separated according to color: clear, green or amber. Color-sorted glass is then moved to a cullet processor for further decontamination and sizing according to manufacturing specifications. The standards are usually between 3/8 to 3/4 of an inch. These processed glass chunks now are ready to be shipped to a manufacturer.
Manufacturing
The recycled glass is re-melted with other raw materials in a glass furnace, then poured into molds to produce brand new containers.
Whether glass or plastic or aluminum or paper, the purpose of recycling is lost if we don’t also purchase containers made from recycled materials. This completes the loop. These precious resources and more can go on and on indefinitely if we just make the effort.

Kim Robson

Kim Robson lives and works with her husband in the Cuyamaca Mountains an hour east of San Diego. She enjoys reading, writing, hiking, cooking, and animals. She has written a blog since 2006 at kimkiminy.wordpress.com. Her interests include the environment, dark skies, astronomy and physics, geology and rock collecting, living simply and cleanly, wilderness and wildlife conservation, and eating locally.

1 Comment

  1. Reply

    Cheryl Mendez

    February 24, 2016

    Extremely informative article! The path of a recycled bottle is long, but easy to achieve. Thanks for sharing this post, I really enjoyed reading about how the bottles are recycled!

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