Morley Glass will be recycling more post-consumer glass and supporting more local good causes following the installation of automated machinery to process waste glass collected from Uni-Blinds installers.

The new plant at the company’s HQ and factory near Leeds replaces its ‘Crush’ machinery, which was retired after two reliable years of service. The new machine is designed to be smarter and more productive through automation, extracting a larger amount of annealed glass out of the frame.

This eliminates some of the more time consuming and labour-intensive stages of the glass recycling process to enable larger volumes to be handled. Through a process of separation and crushing, the glass is turned into cullet which can then go straight into the manufacture of new glass, while spacer bars and any other materials are channelled off into a separate waste stream.

This first stage recycling process is a joint initiative between Morley Glass and Saint-Gobain Glass where recycled glass cullet is collected in half tonne bags for use as a raw material in the production of new glass.

Since the initiative started in 2019, more than 670 tonnes of glass cullet have been produced which has saved more than half a million tonnes of virgin sand from Saint-Gobain Glass’s manufacturing process.

Using waste glass in place of virgin raw materials also reduces the amount of energy needed in production, which means that 199,000 tonnes of CO₂ has been saved already. This is the equivalent of 332 ‘energy years’ for an average UK household.

Morley Glass’s GreenVision Fund enables local organisations involved in environmental improvement and green micro initiatives to benefit from individual grants of £500 to support the work they do.

Ian Short, MD of Morley Glass, said: “We’re thrilled that we can now handle three times the amount of recycled glass that we could previously, helping the industry take another important step forward in terms of sustainability. But equally important will be our increased ability to support more green initiatives than ever as the size of our GreenVision Fund grows with recycling volumes. It’s a win-win.”