This simple machine turns glass bottles into sand

  

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This simple machine turns glass bottles into sand

Fast Company. Glass recycling rates in the U.S. are abysmal. Finding non-traditional solutions—like Cynthia Andela’s glass crushing machines—could help. According to The Recycling Partnership, whole swaths of the U.S. don’t have glass bottle recycling, including regions of the Southeast and the Great Plains. A new report by the NGO states that the glass recycling rate for U.S. households is only 27%. The rest of the 8 million metric tons of glass Americans use each year goes into landfills. “It can be devastating to watch the recycling truck pick up the 30 to 40 empties, knowing most of the wine bottles will end up in a landfill,” says Rubba. 

In response, Rubba and others have taken it upon themselves to come up with creative, often non-traditional solutions to glass recycling, and these new ideas are taking off. It’s not that the U.S. doesn’t have the means to recycle glass. In Europe, 90% of glass is reused or repurposed. In the U.S., we have the same technology, we just don’t have the financial incentive. 

According to the Glass Manufacturing Industry Council, glass can be reused endlessly with no loss in quality. It can also be manufactured into new products — like Aldworth’s plates. Glass sand can be mixed with asphalt for roadway construction, used as filler for sandbags to mitigate flooding, and even put toward beach remediation. (While the makeup of glass sand and natural sand is different, the two are related and the differences aren’t always obvious to the naked eye.) Glass crushing is a concept that Cynthia Andela has been promoting for more than three decades, since inventing the original crushing machine in the late 1980s.

 “Nobody else was doing it. Nobody,” Andela says of the machine that took five years to perfect so it would grind glass into soft sand with rounded edges. Years later, the mechanical engineer says her company, Andela Products, is seeing more competition in the marketplace. There’s CEMCO’s machine, recently acquired by Superior Industries, and Stedman Industries. But unlike these machines, Andela says hers don’t require lids and labels to be removed before crushing; nor do bottles need to be pre-crushed.

 She compares her competitors’ machines to a cheese grater. “With pressure and a cheese grater you can turn hard cheese into grated cheese. When you do this with glass, the grate wears out quickly. You cannot grind up metal, plastics or paper that might be with the glass without contaminating the glass sand, or plugging up the grinding mill.” Her machines, she says, are more like blenders. “Everything goes into it and the action turns the glass into sand [and] separates it from the non-glass items, [which] stay in a larger form.”  The mix is transferred into a tumbling screen (similar to your dryer barrel), and the fine sand falls through the small holes first, then the gravel sized pieces fall through a larger hole.

 The rest of the large debris falls out the end. This way, Andela’s machines, which can crush hundreds of glass bottles at a time, remove labels as well as corks and plastic or metal caps. The largest of her machines can crush 20 tons of glass in an hour. Her company, based in upstate New York, also makes single–bottle crushers like the one Aldworth uses.”