Well ... some recycled glass here does get melted and used to make new bottles and jars. I can see why they need color sorting.

It's my bad ... i probably should have explained more.

Our beverage bottle recycling centre has been in operation for over twenty five years now. It used to be that they were all sorted by hand. That turned into a huge mess. It's very labor intensive ( and expensive ) to do things that way.

Twenty years ago, they introduced something called a reverse vending machine. The customer puts their bottle into the mouth of the machine. A conveyor picks up the bottle and scans the bar code. From there, it gets dropped into a hammermill and the glass is pulverized.

Our original machine had the capability of sorting the glass by colour. Brown, clear, and green glass all went into separate bins. It was a good machine. Processed in excess of one million bottles over the years. It's one major flaw was in the sorting mechanism. That was constantly jamming up and shutting down the machine.

Here it is twenty years later and we can't source repair parts anymore. We got a brand new state of the art machine about 8 months ago. The new ones are really good but cost tens of thousands of dollars to put in place. The problem is that the new ones don't sort by color anymore.

So .... here we are .... there's a ton of money invested in new equipment and the regulators turn their nose up at it because it doesn't sort by color. Jeez man .... there's no money in this. We're just running our bottle redemption center as a service to the community and those guys are getting all persnicketty ?

Yeah right .... i've run into that kind before. It's like a religion with them. It goes beyond all reason. It's never good enough with that kind.

Anyway ... i figured a little more back story would help put it into context.