In Yakima, there's no where to recycle glass

By now you've probably figured out that glass is garbage in Yakima.

And recyclers and solid waste managers say that will be a fact of life for the foreseeable future given the economy and markets.

After several warnings that the day was coming, local recyclers quietly stopped taking clear glass last summer. Colored glass - primarily wine and beer bottles - had already been rejected for years.

Aside from hauling it yourself to Seattle or Portland, there's not much you can do with glass bottles and jars anymore except put them in the garbage.

That may come as a rude shock to people who think green, many of whom have never thrown away glass before.

"Glass is a tough one, especially here in Central Washington," laments Chris Piercy, a solid waste planner for the state Department of Ecology.

"We're not close to markets, it's heavy, it breaks, and when it breaks it ends up in paper (being recycled), which is no good.

"On the bright side, fewer products are being made from glass, and it's not a horribly bad material to not divert" from landfills.

To understand the problem with glass, it first helps to understand how waste is recycled in Yakima.

The city does not have a mandatory recycling program. Instead, a company called Yakima Waste Systems provides a voluntary curbside recycling service in the city and much of the surrounding suburban area, such as Moxee and the West Valley.

Meanwhile, several organizations operate drop-off programs, including Central Washington Recycling and Wesley United Methodist Church.

Wesley United stopped taking clear glass at its big drop-off location at 48th Avenue and Chestnut last April. Nobody can even remember when they stopped taking colored glass, it was so long ago.

"The story is, wherever they take glass, they have a five-year stockpile of each color," says Wesley United sanitary engineer Keith Case.

The problem with glass recycling starts with the fact that glass is cheap to make. Thanks in large part to the plentiful availability of sand, the main ingredient, it is often cheaper than reusing crushed glass, or cullet, that has been prepped for recycling.

Used glass must be sorted by color and cleaned before it can be crushed into cullet. Cleaning dirty and contaminated glass contributes to much of the cost of recycling glass.

Some communities have bottling manufacturing plants or other industries that make products, such as fiberglass insulation, that use cullet. Yakima does not. Without a direct market, it has to be shipped somewhere else, like Seattle or Portland. Crushed glass is heavy, however, and fuel prices are high.

What Yakima does have is a strong market for recycled paper, which is particularly useful in packaging for the fruit industry.

However, paper and glass don't mix. Broken glass is a big no-no in pulp mills. That's why Yakima Waste Systems in recent years stopped taking glass when it switched from sorted bins to the more-convenient single-container system that curbside customers prefer.

Co-mingling broken glass with paper "creates huge problems for end users," says Scott Robertson of Yakima Waste Systems. "It just doesn't make sense to do."

Vic Valdez of Central Washington Recycling, the region's primary recycling operation since 1977, says the company took glass for years in an effort to be a "full-bore" recycler. The company is a division of Michelsen Packaging, which uses recycled paper in the production of tray liners and other packaging for the fruit industry.

With the economy in shambles, the company could no longer afford to provide the service.

"Glass has never been profitable," says Valdez, "but we can't lose money. There's a big difference."

Residents of Kittitas County can still recycle glass if they want, but that's only because the county is locked into a 10-year contract with a westside garbage hauler.

That contract expires in six months. Patti Johnson, solid waste manager for Kittitas County, predicts the private hauler may not renew for glass.

"It's not high on their priority list, because the market for glass is so bad," she said.

Local experts say the recycling public can more than offset the pain of having to throw away glass by doing a better overall job when it comes to the Three R's: reduce, reuse, recycle.

Mikal Heintz, program coordinator for Yakima County Solid Waste, estimates 70 percent of what goes to the county landfill every day can be recycled.

Glass represents about 2.5 percent of that volume. Paper represents 40 percent.

"There's too much focus on the 2.5 percent that can't be recycled versus all that can," she says. "I mean, cardboard - that's one of the easiest products to recycle, and it's just getting thrown away. Businesses are particularly bad about it."

Piercy, the solid waste planner for state Ecology Department, agrees.

"It's a big wakeup call to go down there" to the landfill, he says. "You can walk around a pile of garbage that comes off a truck and recycle half of it."

Robertson says paper is easier to recycle than many people realize. Anything with food on it is out, but material that used to be problematic, such as staples and envelopes with plastic windows, are no longer a problem.

"What we can't have is the cardboard pizza with half the pizza still in it," he says. "It needs to be clean."

Plastic products are also more recyclable than ever. For years, plastic recycling was limited to materials labeled 1 or 2 (look for the triangle on the bottom of most bottles), but now local recyclers are taking everything from 1 to 7.

That's a good thing, says Heintz, noting the explosive growth in single-serving containers over the past 10 years.

Look for products that are made from recycled content, which improves the market for such products, and consider buying in bulk and using reusable Tupperware-type containers.

"Convenient is only convenient until you have to throw it away," she says.

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Information from: Yakima Herald-Republic, http://www.yakima-herald.com