SYSTEM-ANALYTICAL APPROACH TO INCREASE THE EFFICIENCY OF GLASS WASTE RECYCLING

Abstract

The article is devoted to the solution of urgent scientific and practical problem of implementation of non-waste technology in production enterprises, which use sheet glass for manufacturing products. The problematic issues of handling sheet glass in factories producing translucent structures (windows, glazed doors, translucent facades of stained glass, etc.) are high labor costs and time for sorting, shipment and transportation of glass scraps and breakage to the places of their processing. To increase the efficiency of waste utilization, we propose the use of recycling technologies – recycling glass waste into useful products. The system-analytical approach with the use of the information and reference system was used to implement the objectives. The target purposes, chemical composition of glasses, type of structure, thermal history, and cost indicators are taken as identification features of the system. The technological scheme, based on the stages of examination of glass waste, grinding it into powder followed by sintering it into foam glass is proposed.
The process of glass breakage recycling is a complex system, which is investigated with the help of the constructed Ishikawa cause-effect diagram, where the coefficient of its use is chosen as an informative criterion. The revealed picture shows the possibility of increasing the efficiency of glass waste recycling into a new material – foam glass by reducing energy consumption for thermal treatment of sheet glass after cutting, reducing the energy of grinding due to the low microhardness of glass powder and expanding the capacity of enterprises through establishing the additional fabrication shops to produce foam glass for its further sale or insulation of the office premises. The investigation is supported by experimental results of studies of morphological and physical-mechanical characteristics of glass powders and analysis of physical-chemical processes of the production cycle. The obtained results are aimed at reducing the volume of production waste and solving the problem of its disposal.