A new glass sorting line at the WasteServ facility was made up of equipment that was earmarked for decommissioning — as the skilled Maintenance Team within WasteServ managed to successfully turn this equipment into a new sorting line.

“We built this sorting line ourselves — we fixed, refurbished, and widened the conveyor belts and made them appropriate for glass as they were used for other material before. My team and I designed the entire structure and built it together, before having it certified by an engineer. Glass used to be picked from the ground — and now through this sorting line our work is much more efficient and the glass is being separated better,” Gregory Fenech, Wasteserv’s senior technical officer said.

This new sorting line will be processing around 8,000 tonnes of glass every year. It will be recovering the equivalent of around 45 million glass bottles.

The project is part of the plan to further improve Malta’s recycling performance, and help it reach its recycling targets.

Besides resulting in a better-quality material, this new sorting line will also improve operational efficiency.

The process formerly used involved manually sorting through the glass using a grabber tool, however, with this new set up glass will be transferred onto a conveyor belt and is then manually sorted by removing any contaminants such as metal lids and caps.

This new sorting line gives the flexibility to also separate clear from coloured glass thereby increasing substantially the reuse potential and value of the recycled products.

This investment was possible following last year’s campaign for WasteServ to receive clean glass. 99% of the delivered material with the glass collection is now clean packaging glass.