The Fragile State of Glass

You could call glass the snob of the beverage packaging industry. Considered the more upscale beverage container, that image is what is keeping glass popular with beer and wine packagers as well as with New Age drinks such as SoBe, Arizona Iced Tea or various Snapple products. Snobbery or not, the image is what is keeping glass afloat against strong competition from plastic and aluminum packaging.

While glass was once more widely used, the light weight of plastics and the economics of transporting lighter containers has prompted plastic to become the more dominant packaging material for most beverages. Glass does have its merits, but as of late, it has been fighting to stay competitive in the market because of high transportation and material costs. On the recycling front, a slower flow of glass has made it more difficult to keep the glass recycling market vital.

IMAGE IS EVERYTHING

“When it comes to consuming drinks, people are drinking more upscale products,” says Jerry Bannister, director of recycling/public affairs for Owens-Illinois, Toledo, Ohio. “And if you take a look at some of the products, people are drinking more health-conscious products. That is going to be a growth market and a lot of people are looking at glass for more upscale food options.”

One advantage glass has over plastic is it can be made in a wide variety of shapes, a design factor that can be important in the beverage industry. “The big thing that glass has brought to the game is it is inert and it comes in many different shapes, and of course in beverages a big advantage is resealability,” he says. “That has always been a big advantage for glass.”

Glass is seemingly retaining its advantage when it comes to the beer market, a segment of the bottling industry that seems to be dominated by glass packaging. “The amount of glass’ percentage of the beer market has grown at the expense of aluminum cans,” he says. “There has been a big growth in microbrewers and almost all of that growth has been in glass because cans just don’t convey the image they want for their products. And the emphasis of image is very important in selling beer.” 

The more sophisticated image is what has been keeping glass in the running as a bottling material against plastic bottles, which dominate the cola industry along with aluminum cans.

“When you have plastic basically taking over the soft drink market, there is not much [remaining] packaging out there,” says Joe Cattaneo, executive vice president of the Glass Packaging Institute, Washington. With the increasing popularity of single serve food containers for those who are “on the go,” plastic seems to have taken over the market, and glass has been left behind in that segment of the industry.

But glass does seem to be at least holding steady against its competitors. In the first eight months of 1999 a total of 175,080 thousand-gross shipments were made of glass bottles, compared to a total of 173,911 thousand-gross for the same period in 1998, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, Economic and Statistics Administration.

IT’S A MIXED BAG

In addition to the competition from plastic as a packaging material, glass faces other obstacles, such as sorting and separation issues because of color. While the same packaging opportunities in the beer industry help glass markets, the tendency to use amber and green glass can create difficulties when it comes to recycling. The wine industry on the West Coast uses a lot of green cullet, but when materials and processors are not near each other, transportation issues arise. “The other issue at hand is what they call dislocation—the green glass is consumed at a great distance from where it is filled,” Bannister says.

Mixed colored cullet can cause sorting problems, as does broken or contaminated glass. “I think that the single biggest barrier we have in glass recycling is the tendency for private and public collection programs to go to commingled,” he says. When recyclables are collected in a commingled system, glass is more apt to become broken, which can make it less recyclable in some cases. And in addition to broken glass, contamination seems to be a problem as well, with such materials as ceramics making their way into glass streams.

Molly Maynard, office manager at MSS Inc., Nashville, Tenn., says that labels left on bottles cause problems for recyclers. “Labels being on bottles is a problem because it covers up the glass itself,” she says. “It can hinder being able to select it out without hand sorting.”

TAKING ACTION

Problems with commingled collection and contaminated glass have prompted California to expand the state’s bottle bill to include an added incentive to collect clean and unbroken glass. The Quality Glass Incentive Payment Program, which begins Jan.1, is a payment program that pays up to $25 per ton for color sorted glass that meets contamination standards, says Jim Hill, recycling specialist for the California Department of Conservation, Sacramento, Calif. 

“As part of the new expanded bottle bill in California, some of the bottle bill money has been set aside from unclaimed deposits to go into a fund for quality glass incentive payments,” Hill says. The money awarded then goes back into the curbside recycling program to improve recycling and the quality of glass collected.

The legislative action was prompted by contamination problems in commingled collection, he says. “In California we were seeing a lot of single stream collection where all the recyclables are thrown into one bin in a lot of communities, particularly in Southern California, to save collection costs. But a lot of processors are finding contaminated glass and paper. It was a bit of legislation to counteract the contamination problems.”

Single stream collection seems to be the biggest hurdle for glass recycling in California. “The other end of the problem we are dealing with is the impact of the single stream recycling and how to counteract the increased contamination,” he says. “Few people believe we will go back to source separated recycling because the economics are against it, but there may be some ways to improve the transfer of glass or the way it is sorted at the MRF,” Hill says.

And in California, because of a 35% recycled content rule, the demand for cullet continues to be strong. “Manufacturers have to report to us their use of recycled cullet,” Hill says.

But as in other areas of the country, colored glass does present a problem for California as well. “Probably the biggest issue right now is what to do with the three color mix,” Hill says. “That’s where the contamination shows up the most. But because of the minimum content laws, most of that is being used well.”

And some local wine companies are able to utilize the three-color mix, making it not so much of a problem material as it may be in other parts of the country. Hill says the California Department of Conservation has been approached by several companies who say they have new technologies for sorting and processing, but has not been completely satisfied with any of the techniques.

SEEING GREEN

Among the reasons why glass can be a hard material to recycle are the transportation issues involved with the material. Not only is glass a heavy commodity, but it also breaks easily. And if the material has to be transported a significant distance to be processed, that becomes an added cost and risk. The more glass has to travel, the more chance of it breaking, which decreases the usability of it.

But, some machinery is on the market that can decrease the need for glass to be intact for recycling purposes. Andela Tool & Machine, Richfield Springs, N.Y., manufactures a Glass Pulverizer System that makes glass into sand or gravel without sharp edges. “Now that there is more and more commingled recycling and single stream recycling, the glass that is broken during handling can be handled by our pulverizing system,” says Cynthia Andela, vice president of marketing. 

The equipment accepts mixed stream recyclables—plastics, glass and aluminum—by using a hammer system to break down the glass, but not harm the other materials in the stream. As the stream of materials goes through the machine on a conveyor, hammers swing down, hitting the glass and breaking it, but not breaking the plastics or other materials that may be in the recyclable stream. The glass is impacted so it is in pieces that are of two inches or less. Screening systems are then used to sort the glass from the other materials.

Andela says the machine is being well received in the trash hauling industry. But, it is still difficult to make money by sorting glass. “The glass companies themselves have been consolidating and they are further away and also very competitive,” she says. “Your glass is a profit maker because it is heavy and if you are charging by the ton to take it, you are getting income. Then if you don’t have to pay much to get it through [a processing system], it is a money maker.”

Compared to aluminum and most plastics, glass is a very inexpensive raw material in terms of packaging production costs. But where glass costs money is in transportation and, for users of recycled cullet, in sorting techniques. “It’s the high cost of labor that is the biggest factor. Recycled glass is competing with sand and sand ash and limestone, the most abundant material in the world. It costs more to ship the raw materials than to mine them,” Bannister says. “One of the great advantages of a glass container is that it uses cheap and abundant materials, but cullet has to compete with those feedstocks.”

The author is the assistant editor of Recycling Today.