I am currently in the process of (very slowly) putting fieldwork equipment away into their various campus storage spaces, and part of this has involved a number of trips over to Geography.

Geography is where Holly has the kiln for melting my glass, but I realised more recently they also have two machines for grinding glass bottles into cullet and then cullet into sand.

So I took a trip over today, to get our hi-viz vests washed, but also to get all my various types of blue glass (broken bottles, fused slabs and cullet) turned into a meltable sand. Whilst Holly is trained up to use the kiln, technician colleague, J.Y. is responsible for using the grinding up machines, and J.Y. was happy to spend half an hour or so doing just that for me.

The first machine (above) effectively ‘chews’ the glass using a pair of large flat metal ‘molars’. This ‘chewing’ produces a very fine cullet. The second machine (below) then effectively mills the fine cullet into sand.

So today, thanks to Holly and J.Y. I got all the hi-viz vests washed, and all my blue glass cullet, bottles and fused blue glass blocks milled into a hopefully meltable sand.

The number of collaborators on this project is increasing nicely, from Nacho to Lee, and now Holly and J.Y. All very interesting and all very good!