Art of glass blasting

A new grit blast medium made from 100 per cent recycled glass has proved successful as a method of cleaning steel and preparing metal ready for painting.

A full-scale test at Dunstons Ship Repairs in Hull was part of a wider series of trials commissioned and funded by WRAP (the Waste & Resources Action Programme) and managed by the Shipbuilders & Shiprepairers Association (SSA).

Carried out in controlled conditions, the trial compared the performance of recycled glass grit with copper slag, the shipyard's usual abrasive, in blasting a mooring pontoon.

Graham Billany, Managing Director at Dunstons, said, "We've used copper slag for more than 30 years and while this is a cost effective material we were interested in exploring the potential of recycled glass grit as an environmentally friendly alternative.”

In the initial trials, recycled glass demonstrated improvements in productivity over the traditional copper slag of up to 240 per cent and the time taken for blasting was reduced by up to half.