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Why some municipalities choose not to recycle glass

Why some municipalities choose not to recycle glass

I recently got a call from one of my in-laws asking about recycling. She lives in Georgia and wanted to know why she couldn’t recycle her glass. And since I don’t run her city’s recycling program, I don’t know for sure, but I can guess at a few reasons why places don’t accept glass (it’s heavy to move, it’s dangerous for curbside bins if it breaks, and there can be too much contamination, especially at the curb).

Whenever someone from another country asks me a recycling question, I always start with, “Well, what we do HERE is…” and then just provide as much background as I have on the material and the general processes involved in getting it from the consumer back into the production stream as recycled material. Only 81% of Americans have access to glass recycling, so either they are in the 19% who don’t, or their city doesn’t want the hassle of hauling it away.

But it did get me thinking: I hope you all know that here in Gaston County we do accept food grade glass (not window glass, not decorative lighting or vases, candle jars or ceramics, etc.) and I wanted to tell you the story of what happens when you throw it in the trash.

Let’s start with glass is great for recycling. It’s a very circular material. You buy a glass bottle or jar with something nice in it, the content is consumed, it’s thrown in the recycling center, it’s taken to a recycler and they sell it to another company who uses it to re-bottle it. Voilà!

Even better is if you can buy “recycled” or “recyclables” as a first step in making sure the loop is closed. Bars, restaurants, and nightclubs (anyone with an ABC license) are required by law to recycle their glass (North Carolina General Statue 130A-309.14). This includes providing a place to take the containers and having a hauler pick them up for recycling. Remind your local bar that if you don’t have a place to recycle, they are required by law to collect them.

Before you go to the recycling center, you can collect your screw top metal lids and beer caps in a steel/tin can to prevent even more contamination from ending up in the bottle bank. Once the glass is in our collection bin (and please don’t let your small children do this, shards can fly back and hurt them), it will likely break a little during the transportation process, and that’s okay, it will be crushed later. The main reason that curbside programs often don’t want glass is because it breaks and the broken pieces contaminate other recyclables like paper or cardboard. So taking your glass straight to the dumpster is a great way to ensure it gets recycled.

In Gaston County, the glass is taken to the landfill for on-site storage until there is a large enough load for our recycling partner, Strategic Materials, Inc. to send a truck from Wilson to take it away. SMI is the largest glass processor in the United States. Because the glass is mixed colors, it has little commercial value at this stage until Strategic processes it further. What is great for us is that a resource that can be reused is not going to the landfill. Glass is inert, but it takes over 4,000 years to fully degrade, so why take up valuable space when someone else can use it and take it for free? Once it gets to Wilson, the next steps are to grind the load, extract the metal, plastic and aluminum contaminants that need to be salvaged, use high-powered air and vacuum systems to remove the organics, and then optically sort the glass by color (clear, green, amber). The optical sorters are very expensive and state of the art. There are teams from Germany that come by to maintain them.

Recycled glass can replace up to 95% of the raw materials used to make new containers, reduces emissions, saves energy, and extends the life of processing equipment. Other options for using the “cullet” (broken glass pieces) include making fiberglass, highway beads (the round glass beads are used in reflective paint for highway markings), glass abrasives (which do not contain beryllium, produce less dust, and clean up faster than, say, coal slag), fillers, and fiber optic cables.

By using your clean, food-grade glass bottles and jars (without lids), we can support glass recycling, which is something to be proud of because not everyone has that option. You can actually see art made from recycled Gaston County glass tiles from the Wilson plant outside FUSE Stadium in the column-shaped art installation called “Serenity,” made possible through the work of Keep Gastonia Beautiful in 2022.

Keep up the good work, Gaston.

Becca Hurd is Gaston County’s recycling coordinator.