Glass bottles

Doodle-Noodle

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Oct 11, 2008
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Tadley, North Hants
We remove all labels, slump (or melt) beer and spirit bottles in a kiln, drill a hole in the middle put the labels back on and turn them into clocks which we sell for between £15 and £30 each.
We've also started to get quite a bit of business using customers' champagne bottles from weddings, 21st birthdays, anniversaries etc. which is proving quite popular. Probably not what you meant, but its pretty cost effective recycling!
Where there's muck there's brass!
 
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Matt1959

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Sep 8, 2006
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D of T, does glass for recycling have to be clean? I know this sounds a daft question, but I get through dozens of glass jars which end up encrusted with varnish type materials and I've always thought they cant be recycled so have binned them....
 
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Matt, i would imagine the melting down process would destroy and remove any dirt, food, or fragments left over. I would assume it would be crushed and then filtered, as anything left large after crushing would be plastic or metal and could be put through a siv to remove it.

The reason i think this, is because we had a huge drunk conversation about this when somebody dropped something into a bottle at a party a few weeks ago and we wondered what will happen to it :D.
 
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But, on the other side, i have looked into who can buy recycling from you, as i thought, if i went around with a van before the recycling guy does would i be able to collect all the cans and bottles and then sell them :)

I found companies like these guys
http://www.fewsters.com/
Work on plastics, and of course if you could sort through enough cans etc, it would work very well. But the quantities i worked it out to make it pay was huge and im not sure if it would be counted as theft or not as its removing peoples rubbish.

But of course you could collect bottles from bars and clubs etc.
 
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Doodle-Noodle

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Oct 11, 2008
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Tadley, North Hants
I don't really know but would imagine as the previous poster says that any debris would be dealt with via the melting process in recycling process. I should think varnish would be unlikely to caue any problem, but you might need to double check.

When we melt our own bottles we do have them pretty clean before they go into our kiln because we soak the labels off first - that's only because we need to keep them to stick back on again once the bottle is flat.
I'm trying to attach an image here but don't know if it will work .....

no, it won't.

They're on my website under quirky gifts www.doodlesartandcraft.co.uk
 
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Doodle-Noodle

Free Member
Oct 11, 2008
2,157
1,071
Tadley, North Hants
There is a company in Hexham who sells these types of bottles, are they yours?
Its Called the Fat Giraffe
There website is in construction at the moment. We were in there a few days back, My fiance wanted to spend a damn fortune!!!

No - we only sell what we make in our own shop, but there are other people who do it too, it's not a unique concept, we saw them for the first time at a trade show about 3-4 years ago and originally bought them in before we got our own kiln after realising that we could make them for a fraction of the price.
They sell really well, and we do still buy some in as we can't make as many as we need at peak times eg Christmas). The kiln we have only takes 2 bottle at a time, they need to be in the kiln for about 12-14 hours each, so we can't do as many as we'd really like.
 
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