Glass being recycled again

Lasers are now sorting through the blue bag you dump on your curb.

The powerful beams are picking out your relish and jam jars and sending them to be recycled rather than off to the landfill.

Your blue bag ends up at the city's waste facility on Dunlop Drive, where city workers manually sort through it.

They pull out the larger pieces of cardboard and other contaminants. Items such as clothing, videotapes, wires and plastic bags are removed.

The rest of the material goes through a disk screen where newspaper is removed. Everything else travels through a second disk screen, which separates containers, such as pop bottles and margarine tubs from fibres such as office paper and labels. The containers get fed under a magnet that pulls out cans.

What's left travels over a glass breaker. As the glass falls through the breaker, it is fed into the city's laser-powered sorting machine.

The technology cost the city a little more than $1 million and is expected to save about $30,000 per year, said Dean Wyman, the city's solid waste resources manager.

It costs about $50 per tonne to send the glass to landfill and $30 per tonne to have it recycled, he said.

As glass jars, labels, straws and styrofoam lids move slowly down a conveyor belt, laser beams identify the material based on the reflection.

Powerful jets of air shoot the glass onto one conveyor belt, while the rest of the material flows onto another.

Down the road, the city plans to sell the plastic as well as the fibres, Wyman said, adding that eventually, a human sorter will pull plastic lids off containers as they hit the first conveyor belt.

Mayor Karen Farbridge said the new system moves the city toward "zero waste," part of the Solid Waste Management Master Plan.

"We may never be able to achieve zero waste," she said. "But it's important we keep moving toward that ideal."

She said the new sorting system will increase the city's waste diversion rate by 5.5 per cent.

At the plant yesterday, the city shipped its first load of glass to NexCycle in Aberfoyle.

The recycled glass will be turned into fibreglass, floor tile filler or concrete additive.

NexCycle rejected Guelph's glass three and a half years ago because so much other material, such as paper and ceramics, was mixed in.

REMEMBER . . .

Glass recycling tips:

Wipe or rinse bottles and containers

Remove lids from bottles, jars and containers

Place your glass bottles in a blue bag or blue bin