Recycling Glass

I had a question posed to me about recycling of glass containers. It seems that we collect glass at our recycle bins, but it seems to end up at the landfill anyway. I checked into this and found some very interesting information.

First of all, recycling is a business which is subject to local, regional and world markets. The product that we all recycle, gets processed and sold to buyers in the larger centres. The market is subject to extreme fluctuations in pricing which can make recycling centres difficult to financially manage. For example, a couple of years ago, the price of cardboard fell to almost nothing, which meant that our recycling centre ended up losing money in order to get rid of their supply.

The market for glass is currently non-existent. No one in Canada is collecting it at this point in time because they can't get rid of it. In Grande Prairie, we are still collecting it because people want a place to recycle their glass containers. What ends up happening to it is that it is stockpiled in our landfill and they crush it and use it as a substitute for gravel. This is not the ideal solution, but I'm happy that it's getting used once more rather than getting discarded.

It seems that, ultimately, we may stop collecting glass containers because there is no market and no "real" re-usability. I'm hoping that we can come up with a better solution. At one point we were crushing the glass into a coarse particle and selling it to sandblasting companies. That didn't work out well because it tended to destroy the equipment in the process of creating the particles. Until another solution is found, glass will most likely end up in the landfill.