Why some municipalities opt not to recycle glass
The other day I 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 to that, since I don’t run her town’s recycling program, I don’t know exactly, but I could guess some of the reasons that places don’t accept glass (it’s heavy to move, it’s dangerous for curbside bins when it breaks, and there can be too many contaminants, especially curbside).
When someone from a different county asks me a recycling question, I always preface “Well, what we do HERE is…” and then just give as much background knowledge as I have about the material, and the general processes it takes to get it from the consumer to back into the production stream as recycled content. Only 81% of Americans have access to glass recycling, so either she’s in the 19% that doesn’t have access, or that the municipality doesn’t want the hassle with the hauling.
However, it made me think that I hope all of you know that we do take food grade glass here in Gaston County (not window glass, no decorative lighting or vases, candle jars or ceramics etc.) and I’m here to share the story with you, of where it goes after you place in the collection bin.
Let’s start with glass is great to recycle. It’s a very circular material. You buy a glass bottle or jar of something delicious, contents are consumed, drop it in the recycle center, it is hauled to a recycler, and they sell it to another company that uses it to rebottle. Voila!
Even better if you can purchase “recycled” or “recyclable products” as the first step to help ensure the loop is closed. Bars, restaurants and nightclubs (anyone who has an ABC license) by law should be recycling their glass (North Carolina General Statue 130A-309.14). This includes providing a place for containers to go and having them picked up for recycling by a hauler. Remind your local bar if you don’t have a place to recycle, they should be collecting by law.
Before coming to the recycle center, if you collect your screw top metal lids and beer caps into a steel/tin soup can you can help capture even more contaminants from going into the glass bin. Once the glass is in our collection bin (and please, do not allow your small children to do this, shards could fly back up and hurt them), they probably will break some in the transport process, and this is fine, it will be crushed later. The main reason curbside programs don’t often want glass is do to the breakage and the broken bits contaminating the other recyclables like paper or cardboard. So taking your glass straight to the container is a great way to ensure it will be recycled.
In Gaston County, the glass is hauled for storage on site at the landfill until there is a large enough load for our recycling partner, Strategic Materials, Inc. to send a truck from Wilson for the haul. SMI is the largest glass processer in the United States. As the glass is mixed colors, there is little commercial value for it at this stage until Strategic processes it further. What’s great for us is that a resource that can be re-used is not going into the landfill. Glass is inert, but takes well over 4,000 years to totally degrade, so why take up valuable space if someone else can use it and take it away for free? Once it arrives in Wilson, the next steps are to crush the load, extract the metal, plastic and aluminum contaminants to be salvaged, use powerful air and vacuum systems remove the organics, and the glass is then optically color sorted (clear, green, amber). The optical sorters are very expensive and state of the art. There are teams from Germany that come over to maintain them.
Recycled glass can be substituted for 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 to use the “cullet” (broken glass pieces) includes making it into fiberglass, highway bead (the round glass pellets are used in reflective paints for highway striping), glass abrasives (which contains no Beryllium, creates less dust and cleans faster than something like coal slag), fillers, and fiberoptic cables.
By putting your clean, food-grade glass bottles and jars (with no lids) we can support the recycling of glass, and that’s something to be proud of, because not everyone has this opportunity. You can actually see art made out of recycled tiles made from glass from Gaston County from the Wilson plant outside of the FUSE Stadium in the columnar art installation called “Serenity,” that was 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.
This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: Why some municipalities opt not to recycle glass
