Redwave designed and built a new recycling plant for Swarco to produce reflective glass beads. These beads, made from waste from the sheet glass industry, are primarily used for road and airport markings to ensure road safety.
After more than 50 years of successful operations at its plant in Amstetten, Austria, M. Swarovski GmbH recently moved to a new location – the Swarovski Global Glass Beads Competence Center in Neufurt – to increase production capacity. At the new plant, industrial flat glass waste is processed into high-quality reflective glass beads. The production processes at the new plant are designed to be energy self-sufficient. All raw materials are processed as efficiently as possible to exploit their full potential. Waste heat from the furnaces is returned to the building’s heating system. Even dust particles from the filter system are recycled directly at the plant.
The reflective glass beads produced at the plant are subsequently used as high-quality material for road markings, as well as for special industrial purposes.
Redwave designed, supplied and installed a plant for recycling cullet into mixed granules. Overcoming the wear and tear associated with this process was critical as longer uptime and lower maintenance and operating costs were prerequisites.
In the first stage, flat glass chips are fed into a hopper. Depending on weather conditions and season, the wet material can be dried in a drum dryer and then crushed by a jaw crusher and an impact crusher. After this, the particles are pre-sorted on a coarse screen and fed to two fine screens. In the secondary crushing stage, a roller crusher helps to ensure the particle size. In addition, additional light material is added to ensure a high quality product. The particles are then sieved to ensure the desired particle size distribution in the final product.
Glass granules are fed into the blast furnace via an elevator. The granules are heated and melted in an energy-saving vertical furnace. Due to the high surface tension, the liquid glass granules are compressed and take on a perfect spherical shape. Millions of irregularly shaped glass granules are transformed into precise microspheres every second. After this hot-forming process, the cooled microspheres are tested in the laboratory. By mixing granules of different sizes, the desired end product is finally obtained. The correct microsphere size is crucial for the perfect effect in various applications.
Post time: Jul-02-2025