Glass recycling follows a few simple steps. By simple crushing and melting, a pile of broken glass can be formed into a new product. Some procedures, such as de-alkalization or internal treatment and annealing may seem difficult, but they are much easier than the processes involved in plastic or metal recycling. All the underlying procedures are made even easier if glass particles are crushed according to the ideal grain size.
Crushing is the first step in glass recycling. This makes the entire procedure different from reusing, which does not apply any reshaping or melting. Crushing broken glasses involves accurate mechanical action. There are two types of glass crushing – hammer crushing and machine milling. Machine milling crushes glass debris far better than traditional hammer crushing, making glass particles efficient for melting.
Any form of glass, after being sorted, can be crushed or milled into 2cm diameter grains. Crushing follows the same principle as pulverizing aggregates used in paving. Like rocks being crushed into sand, glass debris can be crushed to its yield limit. Machine milling is more preferable than hammer crushing because of its low production of excessively pulverized product.
Nonetheless, all glass waste that will be subjected to crushing must be cleaned so as to make secondary cleaning easier. Unnecessary particles are quite difficult to extract when the glass is already crushed to pieces. Dirt and stains that are mixed up with the melted glass particles are detrimental to the resulting output of the process. It may greatly affect the capacity or brittleness of any recycled glass containers produced.
After crushing the glass fragments are fed into the mill. The milling machine further reduces the size of the fragments, reducing them to fragments less than 1 millimeter across. Powerful milling machines can crush 576 tons of glass per day. A good crushed product has uniformly sized particles. This makes the fragments suitable for making recycled glass containers.
Advanced crushers are used in highly industrialized glass manufacturing plants to obtain the best results. Some crushers even have a mechanical safety system that enables detection and removal of other objects aside from glass fragments. Such unwanted materials might either clog the machine or mix up with the raw material, which may reflect on the finished plastic recycling machine