Tip recycling

I wonder if the aluminium will melt before the glass in the smelter or the other way round? Either way, I presume it's a fairly quick way to separate the components and prepare them for being reworked.

Nick

Probably.

There is metal in the DG units. And separating metal and broken glass is trivial.

When it goes for processing, it'll probably all be shredded, then it'll go down a conveyor belt. They'll use a static electromagnetic field to remove all the ferrous metals and then a rotating one to induce currents and hence magnetic fields in the non-ferrous metals, firing them off the side of the belt (see eddy current separator). Result, three streams - one of ferrous metals, one of non-ferrous and the other of non-metals.

SteveW

Probably gets shredded and put through an inductive separator to remove non-metallics.

Magnets will separate the ferrous, coils will induce eddy currents to separate the non-ferrous, the rest is junk.

They all melt

No but does anything make sense. If you are a successful glass recycler the glut of glass presumably drives the payment per shipment down so they do not bother to recycle it any more. Same goes for any commodity I'd imagine. the thing is they need to not base this on economics but on energy usage. Brian

If glass is received sorted into clear/green/amber i.e. from bottle banks it generally has a positive price per tonne, but if it's the remnant glass from a mixed recycling facility, it generally has a negative price per tonne (or a trivial positive price).

Aha! That would make sense. Ship the shredded aluminium out to the smelter, then?

Nick

And ends up in concrete products.