Pay to Play?

Getting glass isn’t the problem for Hank Mayer, director of the Adams County, Ind., Solid Waste District (SWD). Nearly 110 tons of it ran through his facility in 2003. Mayer says that by September 2004, Adams County had recycled about 80 tons.

The problem that’s been plaguing Mayer since he became district director in 1999 is finding end markets for recycled cullet that make the cost of recycling it worthwhile.

"Glass was costing us," Mayer says. He says the district was paying out nearly $400 a month to dispose of recycled glass.

And when some new requirements from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management pressed the district into making some tough financial decisions, Mayer and his staff took a long, hard look at the commodity.

"I decided at that point it was not worth it to continue recycling glass," he says.

At the risk of disappointing and angering segments of the community, Mayer dropped glass from the Adams County recycling program from Sept. 1 through late October, when he found a new buyer.

To bring glass back into the program, Mayer accepted an offer from Werlor Waste Control Inc., in Defiance, Ohio, a recycling company that grinds glass for use in septic fields. It may not be the ideal end market for his glass, but it works, Mayer says.

Mayer’s is a rural program. Adams County is about 20 miles east of Fort Wayne, Ind., and several times that distance from any kind of bottling facility, he says.

This new arrangement doesn’t require Mayer’s plant to separate or clean the glass, just to ship it 120 miles round-trip to Defiance.

"It’s a better deal for both of us," he says. "(Werlor Waste) has got a purpose for the glass, and we get to get rid of it for less cost."

CROSS-CONTAMINATION. The SWD of Adams County, Ind., is just one of a number of municipal recycling programs across the county struggling with glass. On one hand, glass is one of the heaviest recyclable materials, making it ideal for bolstering diversion rates.

But high-end markets have always been finicky. Cullet is painstakingly scrutinized—it must be of the highest quality to be acceptable for high-end markets like making new containers. And as more and more municipalities switch to single-stream collection systems, generating quality cullet becomes harder—and more expensive—leaving recyclers and manufacturers alike to wonder if recycled glass will eventually be relegated to lower-end uses only.

National average prices for cullet have stayed relatively steady during the past year, says Steve Stein, senior project manager for GBB Inc., Fairfax Va.

"You see paper take huge [price] movements; it makes Tums and Tylenol stock go up, but it has the smell of a free market," he says. With glass "you seem to have a limited market. Supply and demand seem pretty static," he says.

And if the price has been steady, the problems facing the industry have been equally fixed, Stein says.

"The problems from the beginning with glass have been the problems of separating colors and getting clean material," Stein says.

With the growing popularity of using single-stream-collection systems to save hauling costs, carefully sorting glass by its three chief colors and keeping it free of contaminants is a time-consuming process, one that many recyclers are deciding just isn’t worth it, says Stein.

For one thing, paper fetches a higher price than cullet, and paper mills don’t want glass mixed in with materials.

Stein recalls a paper mill that reported confidentially to GBB that 5,000 tons of glass came in with paper they received from recyclers in a given year.

"For one mill in one year, that’s a lot of glass that could have gone somewhere else," he says. "It’s tearing through the paper mill equipment, and by the time they pull it out, it’s not glass that anybody wants anymore."

But contamination is a two-way street, says Curt Bucey, COO of Strategic Materials Inc., Houston, a glass recycler that handles about 33 percent of the cullet in the United States, according to the company’s Web site.

"We get paper and plastic in our glass, too," Bucey says. "More and more material is going single stream and, by the time we get it, it can have up to 50 percent contamination in it."

DIFFERENCES OF OPINION. While the cost of keeping glass separated and free of foreign materials, as well as the low fixed prices, are driving some municipalities to drop glass from their programs entirely, other facilities are choosing the route of Adams County—lower-end markets like aggregate, landfill cover and bead.

"More and more glass is going to alternative uses of lesser value," says Joe Cattaneo, president of the Glass Packaging Institute, Alexandria, Va.

For rural communities like Adams County, more than 100 miles away from a bottle-making plant, finding local, lower-end uses is often the only cost-feasible option.

"It’s easier to move to an alternative use as a cost-reducer instead of a profit-maker if there’s not a facility nearby," says Cattaneo.

With cost, contamination and geography working against it, many in the industry have a dim outlook, says Stein. "I don’t see high-end uses for glass being in the cards as the table is set right now," he says.

But it’s not because higher end markets aren’t out there. Stein says beverage companies, especially those that produce beer and new age drinks like Arizona Tea and Sobe, are using just as much glass as ever to package their products, if not more.

"They are very, very sensitive about how consumers perceive glass versus plastics," he says.

Bucey agrees, saying that he could sell twice as much quality cullet if it were available. "People say there are no markets, but there’s no market for the poor quality material," he says.

Bucey says manufacturers, especially those in the container and fiberglass industries, are clamoring for recycled cullet because using it reduces emissions from furnaces, saves fuel and helps furnaces last longer by letting them burn at lower temperatures.

The problem doesn’t lie at the end, says Bucey, but rather at the very beginning of the collection process.

"What people need to do is take a fresh look at collection methods," he says.

Bucey says single-stream systems and compacting collection methods are handicapping recycled glass before it even leaves the MRF.

He says the solution to strengthening the glass recycling industry is a return to dual-stream collection systems, whether the program is curbside or drop-off.

Investing the time and money in generating quality cullet has larger implications than the bottom lines of municipal recycling programs, says Bucey.

"(Single-stream) is cost-saving in the short run, but not the best choice in the long run," he says.

Giving up on high-end value markets and relegating recycled glass to alternative uses as aggregate, bead or landfill cover can undermine public confidence in the recycling system as a whole because those uses are not "closed-loop recycling," Bucey says.

But Stein says for many programs, giving up the search for unsure high-end markets for the sure thing of low-end uses is a favorable choice.

"They’re more dependable, things that people know are safe," he says. "The fact that [this method] has worked is encouraging to people."

At least if they opt for low-end markets, recyclers know their glass will have somewhere to go, which is a comfort to recyclers and communities who want to recycle, Stein says.

"If they want to realize higher diversion rates, while it might not be the highest use, yes, it is a bona fide use," he says.

GOING TOO FAR. The cost of cullet vs. the cost of the natural materials used to make new glass containers isn’t working in favor of the glass recycling industry either, says Paul Smith, senior manager of market development for the Recycle America Alliance, a subsidiary of Waste Management Inc., Houston.