Greensboro to stop recycling glass?, Off list of recyclable materials July 1?, Tori Carle explains
From the Greensboro News Record.
“No more glass recycling? Could be, as Greensboro ponders taking it off the list of recyclable materials
If your regular recycling often includes the clatter of glass bottles, now hear this: All kinds of glass will likely be off the list of recyclable materials come July 1.
Under a proposed recycling contract, Greensboro City Council could make that and other changes in a vote tonight.
The city’s recycling company, Republic Services, has to pay other companies to take glass bottles for recycling, and rather than reimburse Republic, Greensboro officials have decided it will be cheaper to start putting glass back into landfills.
“That might be really really hard for people to hear,” said Tori Carle, Greensboro’s waste reduction supervisor. “It hurts me.”
Despite what we’ve been trained to believe, however, putting glass into landfills is not necessarily a bad thing, Carle said.
Glass makes up 25 percent of the recyclable materials that Greensboro residents put in their curbside recycle bins, and it’s a significant cost for Republic. Republic pays glass recycling companies $22 per ton of glass, which is ground up to be remade into new bottles.
But the market for glass bottles is declining as consumer companies use more and more plastic.”
“Glass doesn’t leach chemicals into landfills and it actually helps compact trash with its weight, eventually turning into sand over the decades, Carle said.”
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