This year couldn’t have started more positively back in January than with the news that we had made it through to the finals of our first industry awards programme of the year. Kicking off 2023 on the shortlist for the ‘Best Installer Support Programme or Service Initiative’ award in the 2023 GGP Installer Awards for our glass recycling service gives us a great sense of pride, because of the amazing benefits it delivers to our customers, our glass supplier, environmental and community focused charities, groups and individuals and our environment as a whole.
The service works like this: Our nationwide delivery drivers collect any post-consumer glass units that Uni-Blinds integral blinds installers remove as part of window replacement work. This is taken to our Leeds HQ, so our vans are not returning to base empty. Once back in Leeds, the glass units are unloaded and fed into our glass crushing machinery which is the first key stage in recycling post-consumer glass.
Our glass crusher (CRUSH) produces cullet which is of a high enough quality to go straight into the production of new glass. It is collected by Saint-Gobain Glass for them to use at their Eggborough factory.
We offer the service free to installers and fabricators because the glass cullet produced through our crushing process is a valuable raw material in its own right. But we don’t profit from this. All the money raised from the cullet is placed into a fund called GreenVision, which is ringfenced to offer £500 grants to micro-initiatives and individuals whose work will improve the local community, environmentally or socially.
So many organisations have benefited since we started the scheme. Take Freedom 2 Dance, a dance school in Castleford which uses our grants to provide professional dance training to children who otherwise would not have been able to afford it. And then there is Longroyde Primary School in West Yorkshire, which uses GreenVision grants to pay for the materials they need to give children the opportunity to get involved in gardening projects.
Everyone wins with this scheme. Installers who use our service, rather than throwing glass into the general waste skip, can save thousands of pounds a year. Saint-Gobain Glass saves energy in its glass manufacturing process because less energy is needed when cullet is used versus virgin raw materials. They are also reducing their demand for finite resources.
And we all win because of the massive CO2 savings the scheme delivers. Through our continuous monitoring, we know that over 365,000kg of CO2 has been saved since we started the recycling initiative two years ago. But that’s only one of the sustainability benefits. It has also diverted 2,000 cubic metres of glass away from landfill and cut the demand for sand, which would ordinarily be mined out of a beach in Norfolk, by 1,000,000 kg!
We’ll be in great company at the 2023 GGP Installer Awards! That’s why we’re really looking forward to the awards presentation on 16 March 2023 at the Midland Hotel in Manchester, to see all the other great achievements of the fenestration sector.
It is fantastic to have been named a finalist given the high calibre of businesses nominated in all the award categories and the innovative products and services we’ve seen enter the market in the last 12 months. Good luck to everyone in the finals!
Ian Short
Managing director, Morley Glass
