People who live near recycling centres can be driven mad by the noise of glass being flung into the plastic bins with maximal force. There is, I’ll admit, a certain joy in hearing that old pickle jar smash into pieces in a collision with 1000 or so redundant wine bottles.
Some bins have a circular brush surrounding the entry hole, but this seems not to cut the noise emitted significantly (The glass doesn’t actually need to fragment on entry, to reduce the volume of the contents, since the bins get picked up and emptied long before they start getting full anyway).
Today’s invention is a simple silencer for bottle banks, which takes the form of a neoprene hose with diameter equal to that of the bank’s input hole. This hose is slighly longer than the height of the bank itself. As items of glass ware are inserted into the elastic hose, they form a ‘chain’ inside, rather than falling directly onto the glass which has already exited the hose.
Subsequent bottles etc pushed into the hose, force the contents inwards, in a kind of peristalsis, so that ocasionally a glass item will pop out quietly onto the material inside the bank.
