What Should Decatur Do About Glass Recycling?
Decatur Metro | March 25, 2016 | 9:22 amWe foretold this. 
Well, maybe not so much “foretold” as casually brought it up randomly at one point last year.
In a post last August about our love/hate relationship with our big blue recycling bins, I noted, if I may quote myself…
…glass is already a questionable recyclable commodity. It has little value to recyclers and a lot of it gets broken in transit. Mixed with other recyclables, broken glass leads to contamination of other items and makes them um, un-recyclable.
Then, right on cue, at the beginning of year some metro Atlanta communities stopped accepting glass recycling.
Decatur Asst. City Manager David Junger told the AJC around that time that the city would continue to accept glass in our one-stop-shop bins, but the writing seemed to be on the wall. At the time, Mr. Junger noted the city was looking at every possibility for the most unwanted member of the recycling family. We summarized the options thusly…
- Stop recycling glass (and send it to the landfill)
- Have Latham collect glass separately
- Have the city collect glass separately
- Set up drop off locations in the city for glass recycling
Now the chickens are coming home to roost. (Man…a lot of metaphors in this post.)
Decaturish reports that “Pratt Industries of Conyers, Ga. has informed the city that effective June 1 it will no longer accept recycling materials that contain glass.” The city has a few months to decide what to do.
So what should we do?
According to Mr. Junger, every option will cost more – including taking it to the landfill. Are you up for separating glass and recycling it at the curb? Do you want to make separate trips to recycling locations around the city to dispose of your empties? Do you just want to chuck it all in your Decatur-bespeckled trash bags?
The city wants your feedback.
Separating at home seems like the least amount of hassle. Landfilling it requires taking up more space in my Decatur trashbags. Taking it to a drop off location requires me separating it anyway.
However, once the costs of each option or analyzed, we may find that the savings of one of the other paths outweighs the extra effort required.
Total bummer. The is one of the least toxic materials to toss but I’d still prefer any of the recycling options.
I wonder if glass will make a comeback when folks realize how toxic all the plastic packaging is.
I guess it will be boxed wine and growlers from now on.
In times past, they did furnish a separate red bin just for glass. I still have one of those. Seems like they could do something like that again.
I still have mine! 🙂
You’d have to have two trucks and two crews to collect the two bins instead of the one we have now. It increases the price a lot.
Back in the day before single stream recycling the trucks had multiple bins.
Of all the separating that could be potentially asked of homeowners, glass seems like a no brainer. Newspaper, cardboard, and regular paper get wet and tangled. But glass is easy. And it is such an enduring and useful material, that it seems like a shame to just toss it to break and sit unused forever. According to the Glass Packaging Institute (which admittedly probably has a bias), “Glass is 100% recyclable and can be recycled endlessly without loss in quality or purity…”
So how does the City want our feedback? Is it setting up one of those Open City Hall threads or some other online mechanism for feedback?
Yes, the city does want input on this issue. We will be putting a question up on Open City Hall and reaching out in other ways to make sure we hear from as many people as possible. I believe the Environmental Sustainability Board is also working on a questionnaire/survey. We are finalizing the communications plan now and will begin our outreach very soon. In the meantime, feel free to send me your email address if you want to make sure you are on the list for the survey. We will also be sending the information and a link to Decatur Metro and other media outlets so you can also use a local news vehicle to communicate back to us.
I hope that the survey will have a pricetag associated with the various options to help make an educated choice.
Separate or set up drop off. DFM is where I take mine. This has been an issue for a while & DFM is one of the few places it gets recycled. The recyclers Decatur, Dekalb & Atlanta use trash glass.
Whatever the final solution, we collective citizens should make one thing perfectly clear: We will not start drinking our copious volumes of beer from cans!
You may soon find that you don’t have a choice. More and more breweries, especially craft breweries, are switching to cans due to cost savings.
Also because it supposedly keeps beer fresher for longer. Plus easier to store and transport (which is another form of cost savings).
Beer in cans has come a long way. Taste is about the same now.
Here are a couple thoughts on that topic:
1. People love to drink kegged beer. Beer on tap tastes superior by far, and the vessel that is used in 99% of kegs is either stainless steel or aluminum (same as cans).
2. Cans have come a much longer way and protect the taste of the beer from damaging sunlight far better than bottles.
3. You should be pouring your beer into a drinking glass, not drinking straight from a bottle or can. The flavor profile changes considerably.
“You should be pouring your beer into a drinking glass, not drinking straight from a bottle or can. The flavor profile changes considerably.”
Unless you’re drinking Heady Topper. I follow their advice on drinking straight from the can, and I think it tastes better that way. Although some would say that advice is on their can so people aren’t alarmed by the beer’s appearance.
Why the hell would I pour my PBR out if it’s perfectly good can into a stupid glass?
The City is working with the Environmental Sustainability Board to draft short survey to share with residents on potential options. Stay tuned!
Hopefully they won’t use CSD’s survey writer!
I am for whatever does not cost me more. So I say just drop glass recycling all together. People like me will take their glass to DFM. Others will just put it in their city garbage bags. You make your own choice.
As I’ve noted on previous discussions of this topic, glass has a lot of problems in terms of recycling. As with so many recyclables, if you can get clean stock to a glass recycling plant, sure, it’s 100% recyclable. But as DM noted, first it has to be separated out of the mixed recyclables, which is very difficult and often ends up contaminating other recyclables or even damaging material recovery facility (the places that sort all of those single-stream recyclables through a mix of whiz-bang technology and hand sorting) machinery. This was one of the Devil’s bargains made in shifting to a single-stream recycling model: MUCH higher volumes/participation, but also much higher contamination.
Assuming you do get your glass separated (either at the source or at a MRF), you still are left with a very heavy commodity to transport to a single-digit number of regional glass recycling plants in the United States. There are other complications in terms of the difficulty of recycling colored glass versus clear. And ultimately, it’s just not that valuable a commodity in the end (and is inert in landfills), which makes all of the hassle seem even more pointless.
I prefer beer and wine in bottles, and I fully admit to a shameful Pellegrino addiction. But even I must admit that glass becomes less practical as a packaging material by the day.
If I had my druthers I’d be for separating glass at the curb, which does not seem like a hassle at all, really. After that I would not mind shuttling it to YDFM or some other nearby depository. And if landfilling ends up being the best option, I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.
Re “And ultimately, it’s just not that valuable a commodity in the end…”: that seems to be the problem with recycling. Not that much value in recycled materials if one only considers demand for them. It seems to me that a measurement of their intrinsic value should also include what happens if they are not recycled, as in the earth has only so much capacity to dump them in.
You know the single biggest blow to recycling in the U.S.? The explosion of the Chinese middle class. All of the recyclables we used to sell to China to manufacture into stuff that was then sold back to us, they no longer need. They have their own huge consumer class now, so they get plenty of recyclable materials on their own soil. There’s still plenty of reason to recycle for environmental and ethical reasons (and in many parts of the country practical reasons due to simple absence of landfill space). But it’s hard to see recycling returning to profitability without a simultaneous rise in U.S. manufacturing to draw on that resource or the rise of another market somewhere else in the world.
Does anyone know if the glass can be melted & reused by the folks over at “Decatur Glassblowing” on Freeman Street?
I greatly prefer separating glass into its own bin. We used to have red bins labeled Glass. If I have to haul glass to a facility I will put it in the regular trash.
I used to take glass to YDFM to recycle. And I remember as a kid taking glass to the special “get your crazies out” dumpsters (We loved breaking glass in a controlled way..). I would be happy to drive somewhere nearby once a week or so to separate and recycle glass. No biggie.
Separate at home for curb recycling.
Separating it at home is not that tough. City pick up would be great. Taking it to designated sites here in town would be ok. My last choice is hauling it to the DFM.
Yeah, i have absolutely no other reason to go to YDFM.
Happy to do it AT HOME! Please don’t add another errand (drop off) to my week….
Does anyone know how much glass Decatur actually uses?
Maybe I just don’t have the patience to read the fine print here, but why isn’t it obvious that we need to separate it? If that’s an option, do that. I don’t know who this guy Latham is, but if he’s willing to come around and separate it for me, that’s okay too.
There is one more option to consider:
– Stop using Glass Products (wine, beer, etc)
Baby food jars.
But this is so sad. I try to buy as much as possible in glass (applesauce, milk, things like that) so that I don’t have to buy more plastic, because I hate plastic. I’ll actually pay more for a product if it comes in a glass container over its plastic-containered competitors. It is so sad to me that we can’t just use more glass and instead have to use more plastic.
Join you in the wish to find some way to reduce the amount of plastic we’re forced to use.
It’s a much more widespread form of trash that seems to be able to escape disposal and recycling efforts everywhere: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/15092-plastic-seabirds-albatross-australia/.
Can the city install more satellite drop-off locations for glass so we don’t have to go to the YDFM?
I think the answer is to use less glass and add 2-3 more recycled glass collection points in Decatur.
Home pickup of sorted glass will bring significant additional cost with an additional recycling truck that will produce allot of CO2 to pick up a stream of glass that will be of limited value to recyclers – mixed in color with allot of breakage.
The conscientious recyclers will produce a cleaner stream at those collection points without allot of incremental emissions. Those that are indifferent to recycling will carry the landfill cost in the pay per use bags. I expect to be a member of both camps, depending on my mood each week.
What produces more CO2? A truck thst is already running the route or a few thousand Decatur residents driving to a drop off point?
Drivers dropping off recycling during the course of regular errands would produce a negligible amount of CO2 and cost the city very little.
I’d assumed people would work in drop off into other errands, IF you have convenient drop off locations. But it is a valid point – the energy required to transport a bin of bottles is really high when you need to drive it around in stop and go traffic of our small community. If you add a 2 mile drive to drop off your bin of glass, you probably burn about 1/10 of a gallon and produce about 2 pounds of CO2.
That’s why I believe the real solution is to reduce glass consumption. If we all have to bear the landfill cost in our trash bags, we will begin to recognize that reduced consumption will lower the cost of our trash.
Sorry this is probably answered somewheres in the article or discussion but I didn’t see it. Is glass being recycled now? The reason I ask is that I happened to be outside on Friday when the guys picked up my recycling. The poured the entire contents of my bin into the back of the truck and then compressed it like what is done with regular garbage. Surely all the glass broke. So the whole “broken glass is a problem” thing doesn’t add up: they clearly aren’t making an effort to prevent breakage as things are now.
How about once per month glass at the curb. As it stands now, we have twice yearly super trash — a much-anticipated event.
“Super” trash is a once annual celebration; not twice.
Why is doing glass recycling at Your Dekalb Farmers’ Market (YDFM) a problem?
How did you recycle before the city did it for you?
Or, do you NOT shop there anyway?
-ai