Waste glass sorting has the problem of poor sorting effect and long time. Therefore , an optimization method for target sorting of waste glass based on laser scanning is proposed. The glass point cloud data is obtained by laser scanning , the original point cloud data is processed into slice data and compressed , and the point cloud data error is controlled by the least square method , so as to obtain the target data of the area to be sorted. The image threshold segmentation method is used to complete the foreground and background segmentation of the regional image by measur- ing the gap between the targets. The quadtree method is used to decompose the control points of the foreground image containing the targets and reconstruct the background. The waste glass features are extracted by smoothing the back- ground image with Gaussian filter. Finally , the template matching method is used to find the abandoned glass targets , so as to achieve the sorting work. The experimental results show that the waste glass sorted by the proposed method is consistent with the actual results , and the sorting time is less than 1. 5 s , which verifies that the method has good sor- ting effect and higher application value.