Re: [greenyes] This American Life

[Helen Spiegelman <hspie@no.address>]

Susan calls our attention to negative comments about glass recycling aired 
on a recent NPR broadcast.

I have been monitoring and participating in discussions of glass recycling 
on this list for several years. Every time the topic comes up there is a 
flurry of discussion but there has never been a truce called between those 
who think glass recycling "doesn't make that big of a difference" and those 
who don't want to push glass "off the bus".

Here, to get the ball rolling again, are my politically-incorrect thoughts 
on the subject. I look forward to your rejoinders!

Helen Spiegelman
Vancouver, BC (CANADA)

The glass crisis


Earnestly as the environmentalists believe that recycling is the right 
thing to do, it?s troubling to see what?s going on with glass.
Glass bottles and jars have always been top priority candidates for 
recycling. Nearly 12 million tons of this material is used in packaging 
each year in the United States. Because of their old-fashioned green image, 
glass bottles are most likely to be used for premium drinks that are 
favored by environmentalists. You won?t see craft beers and organic fruit 
juices in plastic or aluminum containers. But to the dismay of devoted 
recyclers, a growing number of cities are quietly dropping glass from their 
curbside recycling programs.
The challenge in glass recycling is the strict quality requirements of 
container manufacturers. To be used in manufacturing, recycled glass must 
be kept color-separated (you can?t make a clear jar out of a green bottle). 
The glass must also be kept free of other kinds of materials like stones, 
metal and even the wrong kind of glass -- window glass and drinking glasses 
cannot be recycled with jars and bottles. Because of the nature of glass, 
even the smallest imperfection can cause consumer safety risks (remember 
the exploding pop bottles in the early 1980s?) The industry?s quality 
requirements are so strict that even small amounts of contamination have 
resulted in rejection of entire shipments of recycled glass.
In most curbside recycling programs glass is not handled carefully enough 
to meet these quality standards. Typically, recycling crews dump glass 
bottles and jars from the Blue Box into the truck with all the other 
containers. (Alternatively, glass is set out at the curb in a Blue Bag 
along with paper and other materials and the bags are stuffed into a packer 
truck that crushes them under pressure to conserve space.) At the end of 
the trip, the recycled materials are tipped from the truck onto a concrete 
floor, pushed around with a piece of motorized heavy equipment and jostled 
up a conveyor belt onto a vibrating picking line. Needless to say, very 
little glass remains in a condition fit for manufacturing into new glass 
bottles and jars. Also, abrasive glass shards are a ?costly nightmare? for 
conveyor maintenance at recycling facilities.
Why then do cities and towns handle glass so carelessly? Why can?t they 
separate it out from other materials so it can be used by glass 
manufacturers?  The reason is cost. There are a handful of cities and towns 
that do take pains to achieve the quality standards set by manufacturers, 
but their rewards are scant. The city of Madison, Wisconsin, for instance, 
pays $60 - $70 per ton to sort its recycled glass at a Materials Recovery 
Facility. The most valuable glass (clear and brown) sells for less than $15 
per ton and the lower grades (green and mixed color) have negative values 
ranging from minus $6.40 to minus $15.40 per ton. Thus in a typical month, 
Madison collects 280 tons of glass and spends nearly $20,000 in processing 
fees to earn less than $2,000 in revenues (source: John Reindl: personal 
communication).
Despite the losing economics most cities are loath to stop collecting glass 
for two reasons. The first is citizen pressure: people want to recycle 
their glass bottles and jars because it?s the right thing to do.
The second reason cities and towns include glass is their recycling 
programs is mandates from senior governments. Cities in several US states 
including California face fines if they fail to achieve recycling targets 
set by the state. Because glass is so heavy it makes a significant 
contribution to the city?s recycling rate. Some city recycling managers 
admit ruefully that they could not reach their recycling targets without 
collecting glass even though they admit it?s a money loser (Susan Young: 
personal communication).
Because glass manufacturers won?t take below-spec glass, cities and towns 
have sought out other recycling markets for the glass they collect. Local 
construction companies will sometimes accept loads of glass and use the 
material as a gravel substitute in perimeter drains. Less commonly, glass 
is crushed with special equipment (at additional cost) and used in place of 
sand in the production of concrete (although there are concerns that a 
chemical reaction between the silica in glass and the alkali in cement may 
cause failure of the concrete over time - see: 
http://www.civil.columbia.edu/meyer/glascrete.html)
These alternative glass ?markets? typically don?t pay for the glass they 
accept, even to cover the cost of delivery.
But surely there are environmental benefits that outweigh the cost and 
justify glass recycling  benefits such as landfill conservation, energy 
conservation, and pollution reduction. Alas, even here the facts are 
discouraging.
We cannot justify glass recycling as a solution to the landfill problem. 
For one thing glass doesn?t take up much space in landfills. By weight, 
glass bottles and jars constitute barely 6% of the total municipal waste 
sent to landfills and incinerators. But when measured by volume (landfills 
don?t get heavy, they get fat) glass comes in at around 1.5%. This is 
because glass is denser and so it takes up less space, per ton, than other 
materials in the landfill. (Needless to say, glass is not put to good use 
in a waste incinerator.)
[show pie charts of glass in Municipal Waste  5% by volume,  1.4% by 
weight) source: US EPA]
But more importantly from a landfill perspective glass is completely inert. 
Unlike many other products in our waste glass poses no environmental threat 
in a landfill. Landfill experts like Peter Anderson frequently point out 
that yard trimmings (sometimes called ?green waste?) produce the powerful 
greenhouse gas methane when they decompose and are therefore a much bigger 
problem in landfills than glass. The benefits from recycling glass are 
?upstream?  conservation of resources during the products? manufacture -- 
or are they?
Looking at energy conservation from recycling glass, the benefits are not 
straightforward. Even in the increasingly rare best-case scenario where 
glass bottles are sold to manufacturers to be made back into containers, 
the energy savings are not as significant as for other materials. For every 
10% of recycled glass that is incorporated into a batch of glass, the 
energy savings are only in the range of 2  3% (even glass takes a lot of 
energy to melt). Thus a bottle with 25% recycled content (the average for 
batches that contain recycled content) realizes an energy savings of less 
than 10%. Even if a bottle were to be made with 100% recycled content, the 
energy savings from using recycled glass would amount to only 30%. By 
comparison, recycling newspaper is said to reduce the energy consumption by 
45%, PET plastic by 57%, steel cans by 61%, and aluminum cans by as much as 
95% compared to using so-called ?virgin? materials.
Plus, when we calculate the energy savings from recycling glass we have to 
account for the energy used to ship the heavy load of used glass from the 
city where it is collected to the glass factory where it is recycled. Glass 
can apparently be shipped no more than 240 miles by truck or 1000 miles by 
rail before the energy savings from recycling are wiped out. There are 55 
glass container-manufacturing plants in the US. They are strategically 
located close to the facilities where food products are packaged, the 
better to avoid unnecessary transportation costs for the food industry. 
These plants are mainly concentrated in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina 
and California, making many communities well outside the 240-mile shipping 
limit.
There is a growing market for recycled glass in fiberglass manufacturing 
because this process can use mixed color glass. But there are only 40 
fiberglass plants in the US and long-distance shipping costs far exceed the 
price paid for recycled material, not to mention reducing the energy 
savings benefits.
When cities and towns give their recycled glass to local construction 
companies, it saves on shipping costs. But of course every bottle taken out 
of the system to be used in construction must be replaced. Cities and towns 
justify ?recycling? glass bottles into gravel by pointing out that it 
reduces the demand for virgin gravel. Gravel mining is indeed a destructive 
process, but substituting glass for gravel makes hardly a dent. If every 
shard of used container glass generated in the United States were 
successfully collected up and used as gravel substitute, this would 
displace less than one half of one percent of the gravel that is mined from 
quarries and riverbeds each year. Would these savings in gravel consumption 
compensate for the write-off on the 83 trillion BTUs of energy that was 
spent to make the bottles and jars from sand in the first place. Energy 
cannot be recycled.
How about pollution? The pollution savings from recycling glass are 
significant, assigned a dollar value in the range of $18 to $68 per ton 
(Jeff Morris: email communication relating to Triangle Institute's Decision 
Support Tool costing model). These figures are conservative because they 
account for only 29 pollutants and ignore a wide range of environmental 
impacts. But more importantly, these savings can only be realized when 
glass is recycled back into glass containers. The prevailing practice of 
recycling curbside glass into gravel or concrete leaves the environmental 
costs mounting up as new glass bottles are manufactured to replace ones 
that have left the system.
Some cities and towns weigh the costs and benefits of collecting glass and 
feel compelled to make tough decisions. New York City Mayor Michael 
Bloomberg, trying to balance the budget after September 11, was told that 
the city could save $56 million each year if it dropped glass, plastic, and 
metal containers from its recycling program and focused instead entirely on 
recycling paper products. An audit of New York City?s recycling program 
found that only 3% of glass collected by the City was actually recycled as 
glass. Another 30% was crushed and used as landfill cover, and the 
remaining two-thirds of glass collected was simply disposed of in landfills.
New York City eliminated glass from its recycling program. However the 
savings were less than expected, eaten up by rising landfill prices?. 
What?s a city to do?
[NOTE: this is from a book manuscript I am working on that makes the case 
that cities and towns should stop cleaning up after the Throwaway Society 
and call for legislation requiring the food industry to recycle its own 
glass containers...]



At 12:45 PM 11/03/2003 -0600, Susan Hubbard wrote:
> Dear Recyclers,
>
> The Public Radio Broadcast last night of This American Life surprisingly
> slammed glass recycling and confirmed "through many expert opinions"  .
> there are plenty of landfills." and ". we shouldn't feel bad about
> throwing away glass." They then interviewed Richard Denison of the
> Environmental Defense, formerly EDF and they must have surgically
> removed this one quote from his whole interview to get this one terribly
> unfortunate sentence, something about how "although recycling glass
> saves energy it just doesn't make that big of a difference in terms of
> energy saved through the manufacturing process.."
> Then it trailed off with Denison saying he hoped that folks still
> recycled their glass.
>
> A report that Richard Denison wrote for EDF in 1996 "Environmental
> Life-Cycle Comparisons of Recycling, Landfilling and Incineration states
> otherwise. In his analysis of four national studies that compared the
> environmental basis of recycling (DOE, Tellus Inst., Sound Resource
> Management Group (SRMG) and Franklin & Assoc. for Keep Am. Beautiful),
> recycling a ton of glass saves between 1.2 and 2.8 million Btu's
> compared to landfilling or incineration. The reuse of glass bottles
> isn't in the analysis.
>
> SRMG since that time has done much more work in the analysis of glass
> recycling benefits and many of those pieces have been posted to this
> list. I am copying "This American Life" on this email. Perhaps we could
> all email them with information about glass recycling since they
> sincerely sounded concerned about the benefits of recycling in general
> and glass recycling especially.
>
> Here are some of their email addresses: web@no.address
> radio@no.address      <mailto:kagosta@no.address> kagosta@no.address
>
> And here is their website       http://www.thislife.org
> <http://www.thislife.org/>
> And here is their address:
> This American Life WBEZ Radio
> Navy Pier
> 848 East Grand Avenue
> Chicago, IL 60611
> Thanks,
> Susan Hubbard
> President/ Chief Executive Officer
> Eureka Recycling
> 624 Selby Ave.
> Saint Paul, MN 55104
> 651.222.7678
> 651.221.9831
> Email: susanh@no.address
> Visit our WEBSITE!
> <file:///C:\Documents%20and%20Settings\susanh\Application%20Data\Microso
> ft\Signatures\www.eurekarecycling.org> www.eurekarecycling.org
> Eureka Recycling is a nonprofit organization. Our mission is to reduce
> waste today through innovative resource management and to reach a
> waste-free tomorrow by demonstrating that waste is preventable not
> inevitable.