Green and Clear Glass Recycling
Much to our dismay, our county greatly cut back its recycling programs last Autumn, and I’m not quite sure why it’s taken me six months to gab about it here.
Understandably, the public is deeply dismayed that there is no green or clear glass recycling available to us any longer, and we’re looking to our local officials for solutions to the problem–not that those officials really have the aptitude or experience to offer many solutions. You see, in rural Colorado towns, you win votes by selling lots of houses and winning lots of ski races and you can almost win a County commissioner’s seat by giving out free samples of your signature French roast.
At any rate, people, not me who’s busy working on starting a Holistic Moms Chapter and not my husband who’s busy starting the town’s first farmers’ market, but other people are at work developing a better plan for recycling while trying to reinstitute a system for recycling green and clear glass. I’m thankful for them.
While we try to limit our waste as much as possible, and after reducing what we bring into our home we reuse what we can, we still have a need to recycle some items–particularly green and clear glass. We rarely buy anything that comes in plastic, and we almost never buy any canned goods.
As many things do, the loss of our recycling program basically boiled down to cost. That is, an extra cost of approximately $1.50 per household per month.
Among the solutions to the problem was to purchase a new glass crusher and cancel the curb-side pick up of green and clear glass, while allowing community members interested in recycling green and clear glass to pack of their recyclables and bring them to the town center once a week. I should note that this is how other recyclables like paper, cardboard and #1 and #2 plastics are handled.
Now, this means walking or driving to a designated recycling center that is central to town (everything is central in a town that is a mile long by a mile wide). If you live on the mountain, or south of town the distance is a bit longer, but not by much.
I don’t feel that carting my recyclables to a drop-off spot is particularly burdensome since most of the population is in town regularly anyway. However, according to a council member quoted in the Crested Butte News, “it’s going to be a big hassle.”
The green and clear glass recycled will either be used as cover for landfills (don’t be so surprised, a lot of what you recycle ends up in the landfill as federally mandated cover), or carted to Coors brewing company in Golden where it can be reused there.
I am dismayed that the article featured in the news didn’t mention waste reduction at all, as that is the first step. Recycle is the last of the three Rs.
April 4th, 2007 at 2:44 am
Our city doesn’t recycle glass either. Apparently there’s no market for glass.
Good luck to your husband on starting the market. I helped start one in Oklahoma City in 2003. Feel free to pick my feeble brain.
April 4th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
I cannot believe it took you this long to blog about this. I was soo upset when it first happened because I could not recycle any of the wine bottles. But now the county is buying a certain number of pounds of green and clear glass so I can happily go back to recycling. I get so excited when ever I flip over a plastic bottle and I find out that I can recycle it!
April 5th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
No doubt Tiff. Jen and I have begun trying to reference the recyclable nature of our containers prior to purchasing them to help streamline the trash at home. It seems awfully suspicious that it is this difficult to recycle. But then, I reckon recycling is anti-consumerist which is anti-capitalist which, of course, just wreaks of communism.