In total, United States container glass recycling totaled only 2.35 million tons (22%) while an astounding 8.34 million tons (78%) of U.S glass containers went to landfills. Although landfill costs vary greatly depending on regional needs, at an average landfill disposal cost per ton of $40, it cost U.S. taxpayers a whopping $333.6 million to dispose of those glass containers.
Spending $333.6 million or more to landfill containers that could be recycled is, in addition to being an affront to the environment, an inexcusable waste of community resources and taxpayer money.
Glass Recycling Basics
Recycled glass, known in the industry as cullet, is a highly desirable and coveted raw material for the manufacture of glass. Using cullet to make, for example, new glass containers saves a lot of money and helps the environment because, among other benefits:
In order for glass cullet to be used in glass manufacturing, it must be free of contaminants such as metals, plastics and ceramics. In addition, because there was previously no other option, glass makers have also required the glass cullet to be color separated. Amber (brown) cullet would be used to make amber bottles, green cullet for green bottles and flint (clear) cullet for flint bottles.
The key factors in increasing glass recycling involve collection and processing. In bottle bill states and areas where residents recycle glass by depositing separate colors into separate collection bins, glass recycling has been less of a problem. Several states, such as California, New York and Michigan, have bottle bill laws that impose a monetary deposit on each container sold which, in turn, motivates consumers to return those bottles to collection points from which the bottles are recycled. Such laws account, in part, for the higher rate of recycling for beer bottles which are the primary target of bottle bill laws in the states mentioned above. But such areas only capture a small portion of the total recoverable glass containers, as the statistics at the top of this page clearly demonstrate.
Moreover, bottle bill legislation is controversial and not at all popular with end users of glass bottles who dislike the added costs imposed on their products. The bottles still have to be color sorted which involves extra effort by consumers and, as compared to the use of mixed color cullet, extra costs.. Clearly, the most effective way to increase glass recycling is through the solid waste collection process.
For a variety of sound economic reasons, the growing trend in waste collection today is the single stream, commingled collection of all recyclables at one time. Under this scenario, the waste hauler picks up household recyclables of paper, aluminum, plastic and glass from one household container in a single stop. The commingled materials are transported to a materials recycling facility (MRF) where they are separated and processed for recycling
And that's where glass recycling has had problems until now. Because commingled collection and handling results in almost total glass breakage and mixing of colors, the economics of glass cullet processing have become markedly less attractive. Having to remove contaminants and color separate glass that's already broken and, thus, much more difficult to process, has made glass recycling so unattractive that many municipalities have simply dropped glass from the recyclables they collect. However, those municipalities still have to landfill the garbage that contains the glass and pay the additional required disposal fees created by the weight of all that additional glass!
Green Mountain Glass LLC ("GMG") has solved this dilemma. We have pioneered a way to remove the need for the costly and inefficient processing step of color-sorting glass cullet which will not only restore the economic benefits of glass recycling to both glass manufacturers and glass recyclers and the communities they serve but enhance those benefits as well.
Specifically, GMG's patented CulChrome ® technology removes the need to color sort the glass cullet thus allowing processors to focus their resources fully on removing contaminants. By allowing the use of large quantities of mixed color cullet in glass production, GMG's CulChrome ® technology enables the dramatic increase in glass recycling and everybody from consumer to glass producer benefits both environmentally and economically.
