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Glass is often the material people associate first with recycling – it's been part of household separation for decades – but the data shows there's still a long way to go before all of it is actually recovered.
For many people in Spain, glass was likely the first material they ever recycled – green glass containers have been a familiar part of street collection points for years, well before other recycling streams became common.
Glass is, in principle, one of the most straightforward materials to recycle: it can be melted down and reformed indefinitely without losing quality, provided it's separated correctly by colour and free of contaminants like ceramics or metal caps. Optical sorting technology plays a key role here, identifying and separating glass by colour and removing contaminants so that recovered glass can go back into new container production rather than being downcycled into lower-value uses like aggregate.
Despite glass's long history in household recycling, recovery rates still leave room for improvement – not every bottle or jar that's produced ends up back in the recycling stream, and contamination at collection points can reduce the quality of what is collected. Closing that gap depends on a combination of continued public participation and sorting facilities capable of handling the volumes and variability of glass that does get collected.
Get in touch with our team to discover how PICVISA's optical sorting and robotics solutions can fit your recycling operation.