Quality and Processing
Quality
Quality starts with collecting the glass and sorting it well.
Awareness and training of suppliers, an organized maintenance service, and customized collection rounds are very important. Storing correctly and in an organized manner is one of the main conditions in order to start the processing in an optimal way.
Well-trained people and state-of-the-art machinery give a very high quality finished product.
Quality is like a chain: each link contributes to the final result. All the co-workers are expected to make a contribution.
Processing
The first phase is the manual processing.
The incoming flow of glass is sorted according to its grain size and divided over different conveyor belts. Then, a first manual sorting round is done and larger contaminants are removed from the flow of glass. Pet bottles, plastic bags, newspapers and magazines, ceramics, stone, porcelain and other foreign domestic waste are carefully removed.
The second phase is a crushing process: a crusher is used to adjust the cullet size of the glass.
The third phase consists of removing all metals, ferrous as well as non-ferrous.
The final, fourth phase is the most complex: optical processing. The cullet are sorted into different flows according to cullet size. Different batteries of optical sorters remove ceramics, stone and porcelain from the flow. This sorting uses CCD cameras and compressed air valves. The cullet are then subject to optical-mechanical colour separation and by means of CCD cameras, the differently coloured cullet are taken from the flow. This fully automated colour separation is merely a colour enhancement, not a full colour separation of mixed-colour cullet.
In between the different stages of the process, lighter parts such as paper and plastics are separated from the glass by means of air-suction techniques.
An experienced and professional team that supervises and adjusts the process based on the results of the online quality control automatically controls the full process.
In short: highly modern and efficient machinery leads to maximum recycling and high-quality finished products.