Recycle or trash?
Glass items not acceptable include light bulbs, cook-ware, drinking glasses, windowpanes, and mirrors. These items contain ceramic which contaminates the glass and costs companies thousands of dollars in contaminated and damaged product.
Cullet
Glass Everlasting
By Katie Furnivall
The average person in the United States uses eighty-two pounds of glass per year. The question arises: “Where does all that glass go?” Only twenty years ago the answer to that question was “the landfill,” but now with modern technology and a human drive to become more eco-friendly, glass is remanufactured into products we use everyday.
Glass, made from all-natural, sustainable raw materials, is perfect for recycling. Depending on your local collection company, glass is recycled and reused in a variety of ways. The two types of glass collection in our community are single and multi-stream. Single stream collects all recyclables in one bin, and multi-stream requires customers to sort their recyclables into different bins. Each method has its pros and cons, and each method affects the glass differently. Single stream makes it easier to get more people to recycle; it is a simpler process so more glass is collected, but it also contaminates the glass to an unusable product for remaking glass. When the glass is melted to a liquid material and reformed, the contaminants create holes in the bottles. The multi-stream method is more time-consuming and doesn't collect as many tons of material, but the end result is bottles made back into bottles.
Waste Management in Steamboat Springs sends its single stream collection, including glass, to Waste Management Recycle America (WMRA) in Denver. At WMRA, the glass is sorted from the single stream and made into cullet, a fancy way of saying they crush it. Cullet is added to new material to assist in the melting and making of new materials. However, in order for the glass to be made into new bottles, it must be sorted by color; because WMRA does not sort the cullet by color, most of the glass is sent to asphalt companies for use in making road asphalt. It has proven to be a very efficient product to use in asphalt. According to “Summary of Recycled Glass Uses,” by The Glass Packaging Institute, “as a road base, the permeability of the glass is an advantage.”
The other main glass recycler for the city of Steamboat Springs is the multi-stream recycler, Old West Sanitation located in Craig. Old West requires customers to sort their own recyclables into four containers: glass, aluminum and plastics, paper, and cardboard. The glass, along with all of the other recyclables, is then sent to Curbside Recycling Indefinitely, Inc. in Grand Junction. Curbside Recycling sorts the glass into two separate piles, brown glass in one and clear and green glass in the other, which makes it usable for making new bottles and jars. The sorted glass is then loaded into trucks, the total load weighing about 100,000 pounds each, and is sent to MillerCoors Bottling CO. in Wheat Ridge, Colorado once a week. The cullet is melted at 2600-2800 degrees Fahrenheit, and combined with other raw materials including soda ash, sand, and limestone and formed into new bottles.
Colorado has done extensive research on finding ways to make glass recycling even more efficient. A major opportunity to increase the number of bottles recycled is to collect from restaurants. Eighteen percent of all glass is used in restaurants, and many states are beginning to make laws requiring restaurants to recycle glass. Our country has gone a long way from dumping all our waste into landfills, to creating a system which allows for the remanufacture of massive amounts of reusable products, but this system will only progress if we continue to do our part.
Our government's own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states that it takes two-thirds less energy to produce recycled products than to continue with “business as usual.” This means there are 400,000 fewer tons of harmful air emissions coming from these production companies. The EPA says the fossil fuels saved from refraining from the use of virgin material is enough to power a city the size of Atlanta for an entire year. The EPA also notes recycling uses 90% less water than manufacturing with virgin material. Seeing as Americans use two-million plastic bottles every hour it is a relief to know they are not all landing up in our landfills.
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