Glass recycling facility launched in Naas

Glassco Recycling has opened a €5m glass recycling facility in Naas, Co. Kildare today.

The new plant will employ five new staff initially and is capable of handling 50,000 tonnes of bottles and jars a year, with the potential to save over 15,000 tonnes of harmful C02 emissions.

The new plant will be the first of its kind in Ireland to use optical colour sorting technology which enables the company to sort mixed waste glass by colour and eliminate contaminants such as ceramics and rubbish.

"The process not only adds significant commercial value, but it also creates a product which can be recycled over and over again with no loss of quality," said Zeki Mustafa, managing director of Glassco Recycling.

Inferior or contaminated recycled glass is sometimes used in alternative markets such as road construction or water filtration which can actually cause additional CO2 emissions and in some cases putting glass waste material into landfill sites would be better for the environment.

"At present, around 50% of the 120,000 tonnes of bottles and jars collected for recycling in Ireland annually are either exported as waste product or sent to alternative markets due to inadequate processing infrastructure."

"Recycling a glass bottle back into a new glass bottle saves enough energy to power a 100W light bulb for an hour or over 300kg of CO2 emissions per tonne."

The new plant uses the latest generation of ceramic separators which effectively remove small pieces of ceramics, stones and porcelain which are detrimental to glass recycling.

Small pieces of ceramics in recycled glass can render large amounts unusable for re-melting back into new bottles.