ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — The City of St. Augustine announced that they are suspending glass collection in recycling and are asking residents to reduce or reuse glass products.
A reason is that the city says there is currently no market for glass.
“All the glass that ends up in our plant is being recycled, it’s being turned back into another beer bottle or into fiberglass insulations and our customers are asking for much more," said Curt Bucey, the executive vice president of Strategic Materials.
His company operates many glass recycling plants across the United States and they convert recyclable materials into products for manufacturers. One of the materials being glass.
“I think recycling glass is important I mean it saves landfill space, it saves energy, it saves air emission," said Bucey.
Recently Bucey came across the announcement by the city of St. Augustine about the suspension of glass collection for recycling, and it didn’t sit well with him because he says there is a very high demand for recycled glass in Florida.
“The issue that we had with glass is that one it’s heavy and two there’s no market for it as far as a downstream recyclable so it typically gets thrown away anyway," said Todd Grant, The City of St. Augustine’s utility director.
Grant says they made the decision to remove glass out their recycling stream because they were paying quite a bit of money to Republic Services to dispose of recycling compared to trash.
“Currently we pay 120 dollars a ton to dispose of recycling and 56 dollars to dispose of our solid waste," said Grant.
Grant says in the past Republic Services said there was no feasible way for them to dispose of glass because there’s no outlet.
“Within a short driving distance, we don’t have an outlet that uses recycled glass to make new bottles or has another product for it," said Grant.
In the near future, Grant says the city is looking into a glass crusher that can crush glass into small-like sand particles so they could possibly offer back glass recycling to their residents again.