The process development of cullet and recycled glass aggregate for improving waste glass bottles recycling rate

Abstract

Many WGBs (Waste Glass Bottles) have been disposed in landfill by conventional recycling process, and thereby the recycling process requires improvement to increase the recycling rate. In this study, the WGBs recycling process which can produce cullet and recycled glass aggregate was developed, and Color sorting and crushing experiments were applied. Color sorting experiments with changing the order of the color to be selected showed that sequences of condition IV (Amber–Green–Amber & Green) was satisfied with all color mixture quality standard. The crushing experiments with hammer crusher, shredder, roll crusher, VSI (Vertical Shaft Impact) crusher showed that the only VSI crusher products were satisfied with the particle size quality standard. Moreover, the aspect ratio of VSI crusher products were investigated to identify the possibility of usage as a recycled glass aggregate, and it was confirmed that the aspect ratio of the glass is similar to natural sand. Based on the results, it was possible to produce about 83% of the cullet through color sorting sequence, and about 14% of the recycled glass aggregate could be produced through the crushing/classification process. Therefore, the developed process can improve the recycling rate of WGBs up to 97.1%.

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