Where does your recycled glass really go?

PORTLAND, Ore. - The northwest is legendary for its recycling fervor.

Last year Washington's recycling rate reached a record: 49 percent. Oregon reached its long time goal of 50 percent.

But KATU News discovered that some of the glass people put out at their curbside for recycling may be dumped in a surprising place: a landfill.

This is happening in Corvallis, for instance. Glass is picked up curbside the first week of every month by Allied Waste Services.

It is then driven north in special trucks, designed only to carry glass for recycling.

A customer, who doesn't want to be identified, thought other customers would be outraged by what he saw happening when the trucks arrived at Coffin Butte Landfill.

"The public should be aware of this, that it's not being recycled, that's it actually goes to the landfill," he said.

KATU News watched as trucks were weighed at the landfill, and then headed up the hill where it was dumped on the ground.

The glass becomes part of a pile, which recycling experts say is not clean enough to be recycled into glass products.

Soon after, KATU learned what is happening at the Coffin Butte Landfill is perfectly legal. 

In 2007, the garbage company was granted a permit by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to take the glass collected curbside to the landfill. The permit was granted because it is heavy and it is too expensive for Allied Waste to haul to a Portland recycling plant.

Widespread issue

The garbage company in Clark County is also dealing with its own glut of glass.

At the Waste Connections facility west of downtown Vancouver, the curbside glass hauling trucks dump their load into a bunker.  Then a large front loader scoops up the glass and puts it into a machine that crushes the glass into tiny pieces.

"It almost rounds it like a rock tumbler, so you can put your hand in the pile, it doesn't cut your fingers," explained Waste Connections District Manager Chris Thomas.

Waste Connections sells the Clark County crushed glass to contractors as a replacement for gravel in drainage or road projects.

Across the river, glass recycling facilities in Portland won't take curbside glass that's not pre-sorted into green, brown and clear. Bottles must be sorted by color before they can be turned into new bottles.

The recycling facilities already have a steady supply of pre-sorted glass, thanks to Oregon's redemption centers and the paid incentive of Oregon's bottle bill.    

"Most of it's done in California, so there's a big transportation difference getting it to market, that's why you have to find some alternate uses up here in the Northwest," said Thomas.

Thomas said it is too expensive to send the glass to California to be sorted and turned into bottles. Recycling companies charge garbage haulers $18-$20 per ton to take the mixed glass off their hands.

In Spokane, the glut of glass has reached giant proportions. According to The Spokesman-Review newspaper, the glass pile there measures 15 to 20 feet high and is about the size of a football field.

A change may be coming

The Owens-Illinois glass recycling plant in Northeast Portland is the main glass recycling facility for the Portland/Vancouver area.

The company is in negotiations right now with another company, eCullet, which specializes in equipment that can sort the never ending flow of mixed glass.

If the deal goes through, the plant would use optical scanning equipment that can separate all that co-mingled brown, green and clear glass on the fly.

For now, in Corvallis co-mingled glass will continue to go to the Coffin Butte Landfill. It will not be turned into new bottles, although it will still be recycled in a different way. 

The crushed glass is used to build roads within the landfill. It’s also used for drainage instead of hauling in gravel to do the job.

Oregon DEQ says the latest figures from 2009 shows that nearly one-third of all curbside collected glass in Oregon is used the same way.

Though the glass is being put to a good use at the landfill, people in the recycling industry argue it is not the best use of the glass. 

Many experts say there is more bang for the environmental buck if glass can be turned back into glass.