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Glass Recycling
Author: Mogensen GmbH & Co. KG
For a very long time, glass was difficult to make, and so it was mostly used in luxury items and weighed against in gold. Today, glass is an everyday commodity, without which our lives would be difficult to imagine, unless you can picture a life without window panes, light bulbs, mirrors, televisions, bottles or binoculars, etc.
Why Glass Recycling?
In Europe, recycling of glass packaging is one of the most successful initiatives for protecting resources and the environment. In some European countries up to 85% of glass packaging is processed into new bottles and jars. Everyone profits from glass recycling - the consumer, the manufacturer, and naturally the environment. Manufactured from the ubiquitous raw material, sand, glass can be recycled as often as desired without a loss in quality. Mankind has been aware of the advantages offered by glass as a packaging for beverages for approximately 3,000 years. Reusing glass bottles puts a brake on more than just the growth of rubbish heaps. Melting down old glass also requires less energy than does the processing of the raw materials. With each ton of recycled glass the emission of greenhouse gasses is reduced by 200 kilograms. Or expressed in different terms: If only 10 % of the produced quantity of glass is comprised of secondary raw material, then emission of greenhouse gases is reduced by 5%.
Just how much emission the glass industry saves daily by recycling glass can be easily calculated given the fact that up to 90% of modern glass bottles are produced from old glass. In this process the quality of the end product remains at a consistently high level. To keep energy savings as high as possible when using recycling cullet in glassworks, interfering substances, such as ceramics, stone, or porcelain (CSP), which must be melted down at much higher temperatures, should not exceed fixed limit values. Currently this CSP proportion should only be 25 g/t, and in the future this proportion should be reduced to less than 10 g/t. Metals from seals and aluminum foil on bottles and champagne bottles are also subject to very strict requirements, and for some time now should only be contained at a maximum of 5 g/t.
All of these foreign substances must be removed. . .

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