German recycling company Reiling has invested almost €4 million in a glass processing plant at Ruhrglas Recycling's Lünen plant, using the latest sorting technologies provided by Redwave.

We chose Redwave for several reasons," says Stefan Rothues, Technical Manager at Ruhrglas Recycling & Co. KG.

"The space requirement was solved very well by using our 3-way machine and the detection of dark shards using REDWAVE CX also contributed positively to the decision.

“Glass loss is avoided and the productivity rates of the plant increased“, he added.

The partnership between Reiling and Redwave began around 15 years ago.

At that time, it was still in cooperation with an American company that supplied Reiling with handheld X-ray fluorescence analysers for incoming material inspection.

This manual analysis prevented glass ceramics from entering the reprocessing and glass production process.

Since glass ceramics cannot be melted, this mate-rial causes extreme damage in the glass production process as well as in the sorting plant itself.

At that time, fully automatic optical sorting machines could not detect glass ceramics.

Redwave took on this part in close cooperation with Reiling and the American company in order to develop an industrially suitable sorting machine for the detection of the problem material "glass ceramic".

The idea for the X-ray fluorescence based sorting machine "REDWAVE XRF" was born out of this cooperation.

In 2009, it was, for the first time, possible to detect impurities such as glass ceramics and glass containing lead fully automatically with this sorting machine technology and to reliably separate them from the waste glass.

The recently commissioned glass processing plant was planned as a completely independent system.

The glass stream passes from the feed hopper to the drum dryer, where the material is dried and freed from labels by heating in combination with agitation.

Afterwards, the material is freed from light organic matter using zigzag sifters or separating tables.

Subsequently, “REDWAVE XRF” deposits glass ceramics and lead glass.

The entire plant was designed for a feed capacity of 12 tonnes of CSP glass per hour (ceramic, stone, porcelain waste after non-ferrous/white glass sorting).

It has been producing high-quality white, green and amber glass since July 2021, which is largely free of impurities such as ceramic, stone, porcelain, metal/non-metal, plastic and paper.

This recycled product is now available for sale to glassworks in the highest purity.