Growing Rochester, MN Firm Breaks Into New Glass Recycling Market

SEATTLE (Waste Advantage):  Millions of tons of laminated or architectural glass used in buildings and vehicles are dumped into landfills every year. The challenge is to separate the plastic sandwiched between the panes of glass to end up with “clean” glass and plastic to be sold as commodities to be reused. Rochester’s Watson Recycling started talking to area manufacturer clients that use glass. Glass manufacturers have a failure rate between 10 and 25 percent. One mid-sized manufacturer might send an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 tons of laminated glass to the landfill each year.

That’s a lot of laminated glass that’s just going into the trash. And it can take an estimated 1 million years for that glass to break down to its components. CEO Jeremiah Watson and President of Business Development Patrick Elmore determined that architectural glass was a mostly untapped recycling market with only a few international firms and none in the U.S. working with it.

Once they identified the opportunity, the Watson R&D team rolled up its sleeves and started designing a device to process the glass for recycling. About two years later, they had a one-of-a-kind machine that successfully transformed a pane of all kinds of laminated glass and mirrors into piles of separate parts that can be recycled.

Courtesy: www.wasteadvantage.com