Transcript: Bottle Banks
Recycling at your Local Bottle Bank
When you start to prepare your items at home for recycling, theres a few things that you need to remember. First of all you need to sperate the items you wish to recycle by colour; green glass, brown glass and clear glass.
Remember when you are preparing your items for recycling that it's bottles and jars only.
Do not bring any pyrex, window glass, drinking glass or light bulbs to your local recycling bottle bank because it is a different type of glass and has to go through a different recycling process. These items can be recycled at our Civic Amentiy sites.
The other thing you need to remember is remove all caps and corks from bottles whenever this is possible. Do not place the caps in the Recycling bank. If you are on a two bin system at home the caps can be place in your recycling bin or you can bring them to the Civic Amenity sites that are operated by Mayo County Council and they can be taken there for recycling.
There is no need to take the labels off when you are preparing your items for recycling, these will burn off in the recycling process.
And finally always remember to wash out your bottles and jars and drink cans. A quick rinse will do, there is no need to use lots of water when washing the items, we just want you to remove the residue of any food or drink that are in the bottles and jars.
When you are preparing your Alumimum cans for recycling, it is a good idea to squash the cans before putting them in the recycling bank so they do not take up so much space.
When you visit your local recycling centre we would ask that you bring a reusable container, any type of container will do. It can be a bag you can use over and over again, box, plastic box. Whatever it is, the main thing is that you bring it home.
On occasion you will find that you have glass in your home that is of a blue colour, and you may wonder what bank this goes into at your local recycling centre. You can place all blue glass bottles in with the recepticle for green glass bottles.
People often wonder what happens to all the bottles and jars and drink cans once you place them in the recycling bank. They go through a number of recycling processes.
The glass is collected and is brought to a recycling plant where it is crushed down into fine glass particles called cullet. This is now the raw material which is used to make new bottles and jars. This process is a very environmentally friendly process as it uses an awful lot less energy than if you were to use the raw materials of sand and water to make glass. The Alumimum drink cans are crushed again into Alumimum granuals which go on make new beverage cans or foil trays or tin foil.