Our recycling crews have been super busy over the summer months, with 213 tonnes of glass recycled through our Wānaka and Central Otago drop offs, and from events and businesses in Wānaka, Hāwea, Cromwell and Alexandra.
That’s more than a million beer bottles (or around 427,580 wine bottles if that’s more your tipple) recycled during December, January and February. Cheers to that!
We collect brown/amber, clear and green glass together. Back at our sites in Wānaka and Alexandra, we sort it all by hand to make sure we have quality recycling streams.
We design all our recycling systems by starting at the end and working backwards. That means, we first find out what the reprocessors need to reprocess the recycled material into new products. Then we design our systems to meet those needs.
Glass is really sensitive to contamination so we check every bottle and remove any contamination to ensure we meet the strict reprocessing standards.
After we hand sort the glass, it’s trucked to a glass hub in Christchurch, where it’s loaded into containers and shipped to New Zealand’s only glass reprocessor, Visy, in Auckland.
Glass is infinitely recyclable, and using recycled glass (or cullet) in the production of new bottles saves energy and raw materials.
Visy uses it to make new bottles and jars, with 1kg of recycled glass (or cullet) replacing 1.2kg of raw materials. Using recycled glass in the production of new bottles also saves energy, as the furnaces can run at lower temperatures when using cullet.
