Since the late 1970s, recycled glass has become a widely used raw material in glass production. Recycled glass nowadays is often an important part of the total furnace load. Precise chemical characterisation of the material is required, because control of the chemical composition of all raw materials used in the process is necessary, in order to guarantee constant levels of production quality. For chemical characterisation of a charge of recycled glass varying from 400-2000/t, a representative sampling procedure was applied. After a procedure for sampling & a number of sub-sampling steps, the final sample preparation was carried out by melting a flux bead. For the quantification, wavelength dispersive x-ray fluorescence (WD-XRF) analysis was applied by using a multiple point calibration, obtained with certified & in-house prepared reference materials. The performance characteristics of the whole procedure as well as several results obtained with practice relevant samples are presented.
