We need to reuse, recycle and repurpose

I was as concerned as anyone when I learned that the glass I so carefully sorted ended up being buried in a landfill. I immediately contacted the municipal relations manager, landfill division to find out what was going on. I would like to quote from a letter I received from him.

“Currently, the glass collected in the city of Sandpoint is being delivered to the Bonner County Transfer Station where the glass is being used as beneficial aggregate for various uses around the facility (road base, and/or deck material, inert fill filtration, etc.). The industry term for this type of utilization of recovered materials is “beneficial use.”

As you may or may not know, traditional glass recycling is becoming increasingly difficult in the Pacific Northwest. As an example, Kootenai County and the city of Coeur d’Alene have removed glass from their respective recycling programs. In Spokane, collected glass is being stockpiled with the hopes of future “beneficial usesŠ..”

There is the problem in a nutshell. There is no demand for recycled glass. If there were, Waste Management certainly would sell it in order to make a bit of money off its collected glass. If no one wants it, the next “best” alternative is to use it to replace a product that would otherwise have to be purchased. (Gravel with its environmentally harmful extraction processes as well as the need to ship it to the site is replaced with pulverized collected glass — at least until DEQ took away that option).

So what options are available? First, someone local could start an industry based on using recycled glass. (Any ideas or venture capitalists around?) Second, as consumers we could only buy those products made with recycled glass. (Do you check before you buy?) Third, we could reuse the glass ourselves in our own households. (Buy bulk and store in used glass containers.)

None of the above alternatives will solve the problem.

Now forgive me a bit of “preaching.” As a nation we seem to have opted to treat our waste stream as “out of sight, out of mind” after we put it into the “recycle bins,” but how many of us work to reduce the waste stream? In the first instance we rely on someone else. In the second we take personal responsibility. Think about it the next time you buy water in plastic bottles, buy prepackaged prepared food rather than locally grown fresh food, use store supplied plastic bags rather than our own canvas bags when shopping, or buy non-biodegradable plastic rather than wooden toys for our kids.