What actually happens to window panes, car windows or laminated safety glass when they are no longer needed?
Through professional processing, used flat glass can be turned back into a high-quality secondary raw material for the glass industry.
At Reiling Group’s 14 glass recycling sites across Germany and Europe, different types of flat glas are processed in several processing steps:
- A key requirement is the separate collection of the various types of flat glass
- Mechanical crushing and breaking down of composite materials
- Separation of foreign materials such as films, plastics and metals
- Technical sorting using magnets, non-ferrous metal separators, vacuum extraction and electro-optical sorting, and much more
- Processing into high-quality glass cullet
The result: recycled glass cullet can be remelted, particularly in the float glass and container glass industries, and used to manufacture new glass products.
Why flat glass recycling is so important
The use of recycled glass in the glass melting process reduces the need for primary raw materials while also saving energy and cutting CO2 emissions.
In this way, Reiling Group ensures that end-of-life flat glass is transformed back into a valuable raw material and that glass remains in the circular economy.