An Industry Responds

Glass manufacturers are formulating a solution to the decline in glass container recycling with a little help from the National Recycling Coalition (NRC) and the Glass Packaging Institute (GPI).

Michael Greenman, executive director of the Glass Manufacturing Industry Council (GMIC), Westerville, Ohio, says the industry’s long-term objective is to recycle 100 percent of post-manufacturing glass cullet and 100 percent of post-consumer cullet where demand is more than five pounds per capita by 2020.

“To accomplish that, there are a number of things that we are doing,” he says. “The most relevant and recent is that we are creating a glass recycling division within our organization to identify the sources of glass and to link them with potential users of glass, whether they are glass manufacturers or alternative uses.”

Working with the NRC and GPI, the GMIC is analyzing the container-glass recycling continuum to determine the existing challenges and to develop viable solutions. The organizations are also working to establish standards and descriptions for cullet that can be “generally accepted and understood and used to better handle, better process and better work with the various sources of cullet and the various needs for cullet,” Greenman says. Finally, the organizations are attempting to research alternative uses for sub-par quality glass or instances when glass plants are not located within a reasonable distance.

“We want to increase the number of applications and increase the availability of glass that can be used in value-added applications,” Greenman says. “We want choices so that the last choice is that it goes to the landfill. What we’d like to ensure is that the best alternative has a chance to occur.”

However, closed-loop processes remain the preferred form of recycling. “From our perspective, to be able to get quality and appropriate chemical content glass back into the glass melting environment as economically as possible is the top objective because that makes the glass manufacturer more cost effective and more efficient,” Greenman says.