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Glass bottles meant for recycling stack up at Western landfills
Discarded glass piles up at the landfill in Cheyenne, Wyo. The city continues to struggle to find a market for the jars and bottles it collects for recycling. (AP Photo/Mead Gruver)
Giant mounds of glass bottles are building up at Western landfills, where cities and counties are stockpiling them until they can find someone willing to recycle them.
Even though glass should be the ideal recyclable — you can melt it down and reuse it an infinite number of times without affecting the quality of the glass — the market for used bottles is tough, in part because the raw material needed to make new glass, sand, is dirt cheap.
CHEYENNE, Wyo, — After working out at a gym, Amy Mahaffy dropped off a half-dozen glass jars in a city recycling container before heading home.The containers however won’t end up being recycled any time soon. Their destination: A mound of glass at the city landfill, an ever-growing monument to the difficulty many communities across the country face in finding a market for a commodity that’s too cheap for its own good.
”We are stockpiling it in a desperate search for a market,” landfill foreman Monty Landers said.
Cheyenne hasn’t recycled the glass it collects — 9 tons a week — for years. Instead, the city has been putting it in the landfill, using it to surround the concrete-walled wells that pump toxic fluids out of the dump.
The same is happening with glass bottles at sites in New Mexico, Oregon and Idaho. Read the full story by the Associated Press, or keep reading to learn more about the challenges of selling Boulder County’s recycling.
Jose Zubia sorts through material passing by on a conveyor belt at the Boulder County Recycling Center in Boulder in 2007.
When you toss your glass bottles (or aluminum cans or plastic containers or newspapers) in a recycling bin in Boulder County, it still gets recycled. But the economics aren’t what they used to be.
From the Daily Camera last November, just after the economy crashed:
In mid-October, the price Eco-Cycle could get for a ton of plastic milk jugs plummeted from $800 a ton to $200 a ton. Plastic raw material made from soda bottles dropped from $400 a ton to $40 a ton. And to get rid of the oddball plastics (numbers 3 through 7), Eco-Cycle now has to pay someone $60 a ton just to haul the stuff away.
“Basically, the global financial meltdown has hit the recycling industry,” said Eric Lombardi, executive director of Eco-Cycle. “This is as steep and as deep as I’ve seen it in my 25 years — we’re hanging on by our fingernails.”
… China is the major driver in the global market price for recycled materials, buying old plastic, paper and aluminum from Americans, forging the material into more consumer goods, and then selling it back to the United States. Now, with a slow-down in demand, the Chinese have put away their checkbooks.
“The Chinese have been like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up all these recyclables for the last 10 years at a price no one else could match,” Lombardi said. “Now, they’re turning off their machines.”
Read the full story at DailyCamera.com, check out the details of what you can recycle in Boulder County of visit the Eco-Cycle Web site.
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