A partnership between Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Northern New England (CCNNE) and NH the Beautiful (NHtB) is leading the way to solve the growing problem of recycling glass products.
Ray Dube, sustainability manager for CCNNE, is also a member of the NHtB Board of Directors. He summed up the glass recycling problem—an issue he says people are often shocked to learn exists—as consisting of two main challenges: public insistence on glass for certain products and the incredibly costly process of transporting and then recycling it.
The challenge glass poses begins with the marketplace, because while most vendors have been trying to move away from glass, they immediately run up against consumer preference for glass. CCNNE, for example, uses glass for less than one percent of its products. But the liquor industry, in particular beer and wine purveyors, continues to struggle to sell products that are not in glass bottles after decades of the perception that glass holds a more quality product.
What most consumers don't realize is how costly glass can be, and just how much glass can add to the carbon footprint of a product. “The first part of the problem is the weight of the bottles on the trucks for transport,” says Dube, adding that about half of each truck carrying glass bottles is empty due to weight limits on highways. While trucks can only be half-filled with glass, a truck can be filled full with plastic bottles.
“You’ve got this massive use of fuel to move it around because it’s so heavy. Aluminum and plastic are much, much lighter and use a lot less fuel to transport,” Dube explains.
The second part of the problem is in recycling that glass. Something like a pickle jar or a wine bottle is recycled, but frequently breaks in the process. “Now you’ve got broken glass that contaminates other recyclables. It destroys the other commodities. That’s why today, you are seeing glass get kicked out of recycling, pretty rapidly,” adds Dube.
The non-profit recycling organization New Hampshire the Beautiful has partnered with the Northeast Resource Recovery Association to get more approval for using crushed glass for things like roadways and sidewalks as well as septic systems. Recycled crushed glass works very well as an under layer for many public works applications because it drains very well.
The goal is to repurpose the glass wherever possible, finding new markets and uses for recycled glass. Using it for roadways and sidewalks saves mountains from being dug up for gravel. However, while this effort is underway, Dube says, at present, most of the glass in the northeast coming out of recycling centers ends up in landfills as gravel to cover trash.
“That’s not what people think of when it comes to recycling,” says NHtB’s Director John Dumais. “People recycle their glass dutifully and think it’s going to have another more useful life but unfortunately much of the time it does not.”
Dumais adds that the state will remain saddled with the problem until the market has more economical uses for recycled glass or until companies step in with entrepreneurial ways to reuse it and make a profit doing so, noting Budweiser just spent over $150 million on an aluminum bottling company so that it can move away from Bud in bottles. “I think the next big shock to the glass market is going to be the beer guys going to aluminum bottles,” Dumais adds.
NHtB helps via education and funding, aiding towns with the purchase of glass crushers for transfer stations. It has also helped fund other novel equipment to turn glass into sand or gravel material. Dumais says some NH towns are using this aggregate for drainage ditches on the side of roads.
“For us, as a beverage company, glass is the only commodity we recycle that we have to pay to get rid of,” Dube says, “It’s costly for us to deal with.”
Both CCNNE and NHtB are green-certified with the Green Alliance.