The pioneering free glass collection and recycling service developed by Morley Glass, in conjunction with Saint-Gobain Glass, is helping East Yorkshire based window and door installer Savills Glass save thousands of pounds every year by reducing its landfill waste disposal costs.
The family run company based near Goole fits between 200 and 250 uPVC, timber and aluminium windows and doors every month, many of which are domestic replacements. After years of having to routinely dispose of any post-consumer sealed units in the general waste skip, since 2021 Savills Glass has instead been collecting this valuable waste product for Morley Glass to collect for re-use in new glass.
Savills’ post-consumer glass is collected by Morley Glass when it delivers new Uni-Blinds integral blind units and, once back at its Leeds factory, this is fed into a machine that crushes it into cullet (broken glass). This is a valuable raw material that is bagged and collected by Saint-Gobain Glass for use in the manufacture of new float glass, closing the loop so old windows can become new ones.
In addition to cutting raw material and energy use in the glass industry, this scheme helps window installers to reduce their spend on waste disposal, as Julian Savill, Managing Director of Savills Glass explained.
“I couldn’t be more pleased with the service provided by Morley Glass for the collection of our old sealed units,” said Julian. “Prior to hearing about the service, all our waste glass normally just went into the general skip in our yard and then into landfill. We have been sending our uPVC for recycling for years, and we always have local people who want our waste timber, but glass was always a problem.
“We looked into arranging our own waste glass collection service, but it was unfeasibly expensive. It was actually cheaper to throw the glass into general waste along with all our rubble, plastic packaging, etc. – which was a real shame.
“But with Morley Glass now collecting our old units, we are saving on landfill and seeing the old units being recycled into new glass – and saving a lot of money too. We used to need about ten 20-yard skips a year, but with the Morley Glass recycling service that’s probably down to five. In the last year that has saved us around £2,500 plus VAT alone.
“The service works like clockwork too – Morley Glass collect our waste glass every week, usually on a Wednesday. We’ve set an area aside in our yard to store any waste glass that comes back from window replacement jobs. Morley’s driver knows exactly where to pick this up, and in the time it takes to make and drink a cup of tea, they are loaded up and away.”
We are encouraging other fabricators and installers to take advantage of this post-consumer glass collection service as it has far-reaching benefits.
Since the scheme started just in 2021, more than 2,700 half-tonne bags of cullet have been produced by Morley Glass, which has saved nearly 1,200 tonnes of CO2 from entering the atmosphere and cut the demand for virgin sand by over a million kilograms. This is because every 1 tonne of cullet (post-consumer recycled glass) used saves 1.2 tonnes of new raw materials.
In addition, all the revenue raised by generating cullet to use in place of virgin raw materials goes into a fund called GreenVision to support social and environmental improvement projects. This benefits a wide range of organisations, small groups and individuals who are dedicated to making a difference in their local communities.
Read more about our glass collection and recycling scheme and GreenVision here.
