Four years ago, I began seeking to acquire a small, glass bottle reduction machine for our neighborhood association's use in a waste glass recycling program. I discovered there were no appliances like this currently on the market. The concept was simple: a small, safe, fool-proof, unbreakable machine that would turn our discarded bottles into "glass sand" that could either be thrown away or used locally in our yards, gardens, etc..
I found it amazing that such an appliance did not currently exist on the market so I designed and built one during the summer of 2000 and continued refining the machine through the fall and winter. I retained a law firm and patent attorney and filed a utility patent application in October of 2000. Since then I have built a second prototype that includes several safety and convenience improvements. A US patent was subsequently issued on October 29, 2002*. We are currently working on a third, slightly larger GlassCompactor that will contain all the improvements we have worked out so far. We are using non-standard engineering practices in our design and operation of these machine and are attempting to identify those differences and why they are important.
The larger market for this appliance will be restaurants, bars, nightclubs, apartment complexes, etc., where there are waste glass handling, disposal, and safety issues. A smaller market may be under-counter units installed in homes where the homeowner is not convinced that curbside recycling is a useful activity. A smaller market may occur in the arts and crafts industry and this is the first market we intend to work with. There is no reason to grind waste glass containers unless you can identify uses for the cullet and it will take creative people to solve that. Shipping cullet back to the bottle manufacturers seems inordinately stupid. Glass containers are dispersed throughout our communities at no insignificant transportation cost. The transportation and labor costs required to re-collect discarded glass containers and return them to a bottle manufacturer is likely one of the main reasons that glass recycling is not really working in the United States.
The GlassCompactor grinds glass into a smooth-edged, sand/gravel mix containing shredded label materials (paper, paper sizing, lithographic ink residues, plastic, and adhesives). The labels are dislodged from the glass particles during the grinding process. The "smooth cullet" and ground label mixture is stored in a conveniently sized, sealed container that may either be discarded or collected in an organized waste glass re-use program. Commercial operations can easily sort glass containers by color to produce a more valuable cullet. This requires the use of at least two (sorted clear and amber) or possibly three machines (sorted green) per location. A small glass recycling facility would consist of several GlassCompactors dedicated to different glass colors as well as a means of producing products such as glasscrete or fused glass tiles. The capital cost for setting up a small operation of this nature might be as low as $250,000 and could process between 150,000 pounds to 200,000 pounds of waste glass products per year.
Safety features we are providing include various shut-offs, system status checks, and an air filtration device to remove odors, humidity, and to protect the operator(s) from respireable particles. Air flow through the system is also used to collect fine glass particulates. The machine requires little attendance by the operator. Energy consumption is about 900 watts. Glass bottles can be stored in the machine until such time the machine is full and a timed switch can then be activated to process the stored bottles. Presently, storage capacity of our prototypes is about 40 pounds and production is about 16 pounds per hour with a product storage capacity of up to 85 pounds. This would be a suitable rate for a restaurant or bar that produces from one-hundred to two-hundred pounds of waste glass beverage containers per day. Processing containers according to color could require the use of several GlassCompactors. Therefore, the optimum situation would be a waste glass container production rate of 200 pounds of waste glass containers in each of the three basic container colors. That would process about 1200 containers a day or 50 cases of 24 bottles. The largest single-source generator of glass containers that we have found locally produces nearly 9,000 pounds of discarded bottles per month and a small scale facility could be set up just to handle their waste bottles.
The real issue is identifying possible uses of the cullet. We are providing samples of raw and processed cullet to local artisans and crafts people for experimental purposes. Samples must be picked up, however, as glass is far too heavy to ship cost effectively. Call or email us if you want cullet to experiment with product development. We also know of other local sources of cullet produced by means other than our approach and there are differences in the characteristics of the cullet.
The only product research effort we are conducting is the use of various colors of glass containers as trace element supplements for soil. Glass is colored by additions of various metal compounds (iron, manganese, etc.). As the glass particles corrode in the soils they will release these metal compounds. So it is merely a matter of what metals are in what colors of glass and what size the particles need to be to effectively release the correct amount of trace elements for uptake by vegetation in different soil types and growing conditions.
* US Patent No. 6471148
Additional Patents Pending
Paisano Glass Compactors LLC
834 Castle Ridge Road
Austin, Texas 78746-5152
(512) 327-6672 Fax 327-1974
E-mail to Rusty Mase, Development Coordinator jrmase@bga.com
URL: http:www.glasscompacter.com/intent.html July 30, 2001.
Revised April 6, 2006