Glass has long been known as one of the most recyclable materials for containers. Glass bottles have been returned for re-use or recycling since their inception. When shipping large volumes of stacked or loosely packed empty glass bottles to a reprocessing plant, large amounts of air are shipped with them. This resulting increase in the volume of goods moved, over the volume of actual glass, multiplies freight costs. By crushing the bottles into small fragments, known as comminution, the overall volume of shipped bottles approaches that of only the glass itself.
Of course, breaking bottles manually is a difficult and dangerous task, so devices have been designed for automatically crushing bottles. As more states adopt bottle deposit laws and recycling becomes more widespread, the need for simple, effective and inexpensive machines to perform the bottle crushing has become greater.
Problems that have plagued earlier machines include the ability to quickly reduce a bottle to safe size fragments while guaranteeing that no large fragments survive the process and threaten any subsequent handler of the fragments. If a large fragment survives, the edges of its facets can become knives, potentially cutting not only the sack or container holding the fragments, but the operator who must move that sack. To date, only complex and expensive machines have managed to fulfill this need, such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,733,826 of Komori et al.
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a bottle crushing machine that can quickly reduce bottles to fragments smaller than a selected size.
It is a further object of the invention that the bottle crushing machine be quickly and easily adjustable and maintainable.
Another object of the invention is to provide a bottle crushing machine that prevents the release of fine glass dust from the machine avoiding operator contact with the dust, especially the inhaling thereof.
It is a still further object of the invention that the glass fragments be conveniently packaged for disposal and sanitary purposes.
It is yet another object of the invention to form a bottle crushing machine that is simple and cost effective to manufacture.