The partnership has already invest £5 million in new sorting and separation technology to provide Ardagh with ‘pure’ cullet to make new glass bottles and jars.

Technology details

The technology, developed by Reuse, delivers this ‘pure’ cullet by sorting incoming waste streams in four stages:

• removing medium sized organic and loose ferrous metals;
• drying recyclate to remove dust and smaller materials;
• removing residual metallic, leaded glass and ‘materials that burn at much higher temperatures than container glass, such as pyrex’; and
• cleaning and sorting the remaining material using ‘a range of advanced cleaning, purification and optical sorting techniques’.

According to the partnership, the system enables ‘much better material recovery of glass by colour from the waste stream’, as it can separate glass particles (by colour) that are four millimetres (mm) wide. Previous technology could reportedly only separate glass particles (by colour) larger than 10mm.

It is hoped the technology will boost the amount of high-quality glass cullet available from co-mingled streams.

Mark Wilson from Reuse explained: “With recent changes over the past few years in the way waste glass is collected, moving away from bottle banks to co-mingled household (kerbside) collections, the main challenge we faced was to find better ways of separating the glass from other recyclables, and then re-processing it into quality colour separated cullet.

“This latest investment, the first in an ongoing programme, gives us the technology to produce more finished cullet of the highest standard to meet the growing requirements of Ardagh.”

‘Easier and more effective’ to recycle glass from separate collections

Wilson added however, that it “remains easier and more effective to recycle glass back into glass bottles and jars when glass is collected separately from other packaging materials”.

He said: “We therefore urge councils to consider this when renewing their waste management contracts and to specify that recycled glass goes back into making new glass packaging rather than less sustainable uses such as aggregates. We are happy to share our knowledge and experience to support the process and help increasing glass recycling rates even further.”

Technology boosting recycled content

Ardagh has said that the technology has so far enabled it to increase the recycled content of its glass packaging by 12 per cent.

Sharon Crayton, Head of Marketing at Ardagh Glass, Europe (pictured above, right with Jamie Brown, Reuse's Head of Production), commented: “We have been producing green bottles that contain over 90 per cent of recycled glass for many years, but high recycling levels for clear (flint) glass have previously posed a challenge due to difficulties in colour separating clear glass back to a pure enough colour at the required quality specification.

“This new technology has put us at the forefront of UK recycling, helping us to significantly increase the recycled content for flint bottles and jars.”

She added that Ardagh’s Doncaster plant, which only produces flint glass, achieved an average recycled content level of over 50 per cent in the first quarter of 2014 against an average recycling rate of 32 per cent in the same quarter of 2013.

The new Reuse glass sorting and separation facilities will eventually have the capacity to process up to 250,000 tonnes of waste glass, approximately 13 per cent of the UK’s steam of waste glass.

Find out more about the Ardagh/Reuse partnership.