If you did not attend this workshop, held in Toronto on February 11, you missed some very good presentations from Canadian and American innovators. From the Ontario scene we saw how Christine Lucyk, a consultant for Halton Recycling, managed to change sortation to meet changes in the glass market. In the spring of 1998, the bottom fell out of the market for three-colour glass. As a result, the company had no market for its three-colour mix, except for use as landfill cover at a cost of $1500/load. In a region servicing 100,000 households, the cost could quickly add up. The solution was to improve sortation to a two-stream system of clear (already in place) and coloured, ie. only amber and green. A 4ft x 9ft shaker screen, with 3"x3" mesh slanted at a 22o angle, was added at the end of the negative (coloured) sort line. The smaller broken pieces, largely clear glass, dropped into a bunker directly below the screen, while coloured glass rolled down the screen into a separate bunker. The cost was about $3,000 in labour and materials. The result - saleable coloured glass, a much smaller amount of residue (for which a market has now been found). Payback time was achieved in just 2 loads (about 2 weeks of coloured glass). Her recipe for success includes 5 points:
Then Mary Little shared ideas to minimize glass breakage in her Northumberland County MRF. "It was really simple. All we did was attach a flat piece of rubber to the end of a conveyor to slow the glass down. This rubber baffle helped prevent the glass from breaking. Actually it looks like when we assembled the line we forgot to pull something off, but it works well. Some of our best solutions involve a little ingenuity and duct tape. Success doesn't have to be fancy or expensive."
Mary was not only able to reduce glass breakage, thereby reducing residue, she is working with a local company to source glass residue into another low-tech solution and at a cost savings of $12,000 per year.
David Dougherty from CWC (formerly the Clean Washington Centre) made several good hard-hitting points. It is in a municipality's best interest to find the highest value for its materials, whether it is for glass or any other material for that matter. The key to market development is not to butt heads with people, but to innovate and relentlessly look for new markets. CWC has established quality standards for materials and new manufacturing processes. They have many reports that are available on markets, innovations and opportunities through their website at www.cwc.org.
For more details on these presentations and a report, Challenges and Opportunities in Mixed Three Colour Glass Recycling in Ontario, check with CSR at www.csr.org.
This workshop was sponsored by Consumers Glass and CSR: Corporations Supporting Recycling with support from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, Ministry of the Environment and the Recycling Council of Ontario.
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