Glass firms seek recyclate abroad as co-mingled collections ‘ruin quality’

UK glass firms turned 662,000 tonnes of used containers back into new ones in 2008, but British Glass recycling manager Rebecca Cocking said low-quality material meant that 64,000 tonnes of material had to be sourced from overseas.

Cocking admitted that the material mostly came from Ireland and nearby Continental Europe, but warned that the trend towards co-mingled collections was affecting the amount of usable material.

“A majority of glass [from co-mingled] collections has been compacted so that even if it was clean enough, you wouldn’t be able to optical sort it. The less material available for reprocessing, the more virgin material we have to use. So, to meet targets, firms are looking to imports,” she said.

The remainder of the 1.6m tonnes of container glass that the UK recycled last year was exported or used in fibre-glass and aggregates.

Cocking said British Glass was sympathetic to local authorities that had invested in facilities, but said the government needed to do more to determine a national recycling policy. “There seems to be a reluctance to push local authorities down a particular recycling route,” she said.

She suggested greater use of bottle banks for glass collections, or ensuring waste collections did not compact the material to the extent they do now. “If waste is crushed to 10mm pieces it can be difficult to distinguish between glass and ceramic. Between 15mm and 20mm gives us a better chance of removing it,” said Cocking.

“Our members don’t want to have to import, but we need the material.”

Last week, recycling firm Greenstar backed co-mingled collections for increasing the amount of recovered material. It highlighted the gains to five councils by switching from kerbside-sort to single-stream co-mingled collections. Click here for the full story.

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