The Process of Glass Bottle Recycling in Europe

Glass bottle recycling in Europe is made easy for the residents of the UK and other parts of Europe. In the UK alone there are over 7,000 banks for people to deposit their recycled bottles. Glass bottle recycling in Europe is so simple; just pick up your bottles and drop them off at the bank on your shopping trip. Special trucks are built to empty the full banks into separate compartments to separate the colors. Once the trucks are loaded from the bottle banks they go to the processing plants in Europe. In the UK, one such processing plant is in South Yorkshire.

Most glass bottle recycling in Europe done on a daily basis collects over 250,000 bottles each hour. The bottles are stored in bays after being sorted by color until they are ready to be processed. From there the bottles are loaded onto a conveyor belt where they will be transported from one section of the processing plant to another. Recycling is big business, and creates jobs for people. Though there is automation in the processing, people do have to oversee the glass bottle recycling in Europe. Workers are in place to do a manual sorting of the recyclate, because even though efforts have been made to sort by colors, there still are pieces of ceramic, brick and plastic that gets mixed in.

Once the manual sorting has been done, glass bottle recycling in Europe commences the crushing and screening process. A huge machine crushes the glass into cullet. The steel rollers are set to crush the cullet into the size that has been ordered by the customer. After the glass is crushed the glass cullet goes through a screening; a large powerful magnet is passed over the glass to remove steel, iron and wire and other iron based materials.

After the magnet screening the glass bottle recycling in Europe is not completed until the pieces of glass cullet are passed through a vibrating screen that removes ceramic, brick and stone that has slipped through previous screenings. All this foreign material has to be removed for the glass cullet before melting because the metal, stone, ceramic and other impurities would melt into the glass manufacturing process.

Glass bottle recycling in Europe is everyone's responsibility. The citizens of Europe are aware of their carbon footprint, which is the impact that their contribution makes on the environment. Carbon footprints are classified into two categories, which are primary and secondary. The primary footprint has to do with the amount of greenhouse gases released into the environment from cars, planes, and public transit, as well as the domestic energy used. The secondary footprint has to do more directly with you; it has to do with the amount of greenhouse gas emitted from the manufacture of products through to their breakdown. The European countries are leading the world by example how to sustain the environment through recycling.