Phew, that glass bottle you just put in the recycling bin is actually going to escape the landfill.
After the local glass recycling network was disrupted last year, Seattle Public Utilities announced today that glass collected in residential recycling bins is being recycled again.
In December, the Ardagh Glass Packaging plant in Georgetown, which made new wine bottles, closed because of competition from cheaper imported bottles and challenges in the Washington wine industry. That closure deprived Seattle’s recycling network of its main glass buyer and hobbled the system.
Meanwhile, clean crushed glass that was ready to be recycled in Seattle and King County was being stockpiled by Strategic Materials, a company that processes much of the area’s used glass products and had been selling it to Ardagh.
Pierce and Skagit counties also depended on the Ardagh facility for glass recycling. When the plant closed, Pierce County started sending glass to a Portland recycler and Skagit County told its residents to put glass in the regular trash.
SPU announced today that glass recycling is back on after Sibelco, a global recycling company that acquired Strategic Materials last year, had been able to “improve its rail transportation system and develop new customers in the western U.S. for the recycled glass products.” (Skagit County resumed collecting glass for recycling in April and Pierce County has returned to recycling class locally. Tacoma is still sending its glass to Portland.)
“This allows Sibelco to resume receiving glass from recycling programs in Seattle and throughout the Pacific Northwest,” SPU said in a news release.
A spokesperson for Sibelco said they could not share information about new recycled glass customers since “it is competitively sensitive.”
After glass is collected in Seattle and King County, it is sorted and cleaned in Sodo by Republic Services, a Seattle and King County contractor. The glass is then sent to Sibelco, which turns the glass into crushed glass shards that are ready to be recycled.
The Seattle facility now run by Sibelco used to process around 100,000 tons of glass annually with Seattle making up around a fifth of that, according to SPU.
According to SPU, glass makes up 15% to 20% of residential recycling by weight and is one of the most recyclable materials.
The Recycling Reform Act, which was signed into law in May, is expected to boost recycling statewide and increase demand for glass recycling infrastructure. Currently, access to recycling varies widely across the state; 11 counties have no recycling services at all.
Advocates have said recycling decreases greenhouse gas emissions because manufacturing plastics, metals and glass from raw materials is often more energy intensive than using recycled materials.
