Overview

Add some sort of introduction(?)

Motivation

The UK alone recycles 752,000 tonnes of glass each year. This saves around 237 million kilograms of CO₂ from being released into the atmosphere.

The process of making glass involves melting sand, soda ash and limestone at 1500^oC, the use of recycled glass means the energy used to extract these materials can be saved. As a result recycled glass leads to a 20% reduction in air pollution and a 50% reduction in water pollution compared to making glass from scratch. For every tonne of glass recycled 1.2 tonnes of these materials is saved.

The level of waste recycled in the UK is substantially lower than the level of waste placed into recycling bins. 25% of waste put into recycled bins ends up in landfill, a primary cause for this is contamination.

Glass recycling is often overlooked when it comes to contamination in recycling however this should not be the case. Based on the country or even county you live in the glass recycling systems can vary hugely. Some regions require the user to separate by colour whilst others rely on this being carried out at a later stage.

Glass can be 100% recycled with no loss in quality. Glasses ability to be recycled without a drop in contamination is heavily dependant on a lack of contamination. This is because the variation of colour across glass is brought about through the addition of different impurities. Brown (amber) glass is created using carbon nickle and sulfer. These protect the contents from sunlight. Green glass is made using copper, iron and chromium. Clear glass is simply pure sand and limestone. By introducing impurities from a separate colour of glass into the stream the quality of the glass will swiftly diminish.

We propose a simple solution that could be integrated at any level in the recycling chain. Glassify is an incredibly low cost system which rapidly sorts glass by colour.

Describe functionality briefly