Telegreen Recycling Equipment

The Future of Glass: New York City

As the rate of glass recycling increases, glass crushers will play an increasingly more important role for MRF operators and processors everywhere. According to Andela Products, “Glass recycling has an exciting future. We’ve just begun to explore how this resource can pay off.”

If the glass that can be recovered from the recycling stream was substituted for aggregate (like limestone for example), a well-run high volume MRF has as much commercial value as a traditional limestone quarry. A MRF would have a continual supply of aggregate however, as apposed to the quarry that is mined and gone.

To put things in perspective, it is estimated that over 4,000 tons of recyclable glass is discarded in New York City alone - every week. That’s an annual resource pool of over 416,000,000 pounds of available raw material - from a single metropolitan area. On a national basis, there are hundreds of these “urban mines” representing an inexhaustible supply of recyclable glass. Through additional research, new applications for recycled glass are created and tested every year.

The markets are there. To boost the rate of glass recycling, MRF operators need to partner with private contractors and aggregate producers (or users) to get their raw material “out of the pit” and into the consumers of specialty aggregates.