CEDAR RAPIDS — It is as if city officials here are tiptoeing across broken glass, not talking about the recycling of it.
Even so, Pat Ball, the city’s utilities director, and Mark Jones, the city’s solid waste/recycling manager, said this week that they have begun to take a “cautious” look at the prospect of ending the curbside collection of glass containers as part of Cedar Rapids’ weekly recycling program.
The reasons are several:
Cost: The city receives no revenue for the recycled glass, and, in fact, must pay its recycling company, City Carton Recycling, to take the glass off its hands. Meanwhile, City Carton says it pays more to ship recycled glass to a St. Louis, Mo., glass refinery than what the refinery pays it for the material.
The trend: Many cities — including Iowa City and Marion and, most recently, Dubuque — don’t collect glass at the curbside.
Future savings: Giving up on curbside glass collection will allow the city to eliminate special compartments for glass on its recycling trucks and add an automated arm to them. In fact, such a change in truck design might allow the city to purchase the same design of truck in the future that, interchangeably, can pick up garbage, yard waste and non-glass recyclables.
No matter the reasons for change, the city’s Jones suspected Wednesday that the city will need to makes it case to the public before it moves to modify one of the long-standing pieces of its curbside recycling program.
“Anytime you have a commodity that has been recycled for a while and diverted from the landfill, and all of a sudden you’re sending it back to a landfill as one option, that does cause concern,” Jones said. “So we need to be careful how we look at this.”
A decision by the city of Dubuque to drop its curbside collection of container glass for recycling is helping to prompt the city of Cedar Rapids to look at its program, the city’s Ball told the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency Board, of which Ball and Jones are members. The agency is comprised of the communities in Linn County.
Paul Schultz, Dubuque’s resource management coordinator, on Wednesday said the city of Dubuque gave up curbside collection of glass on July 1 with little or no public outcry, which he attributed to plentiful public discussion that preceded the change.
As of July 1, the typical Dubuque homeowner’s monthly utility bill has dropped by 37 cents, Schultz noted, to reflect the $100,000 or savings he projects for the city’s solid-waste operation because its recycling operation no longer picks up glass. The change has allowed the city to reduce by one the number of trucks and drivers in its recycling operation, he explained.
Schultz said the decision on glass makes sense on several fronts.
Overall, he said the city of Dubuque receives $80 per ton from its private recycling vendor for recyclables like newspaper, magazines and plastic, but was paying $40 a ton — or about $12,000 a year — for the vendor to accept glass.
In the end, too, more energy was expended in getting the recycled glass to a glass refiner south of Chicago than the energy saved by using recycled glass to make new glass or glass products, he said.
In Iowa City, Rodney Walls, assistant solid waste superintendent, said Wednesday that the city of Iowa City’s recycling operation stopped picking up glass containers at the curb some years ago because it made more sense to use one of the compartments on the city recycling trucks for magazines, rather than glass. The reasons were many: Glass didn’t provide the city any revenue; it put workers and residents at risk; and once in a while someone would toss in colored glass with clear glass or vice versa and contaminate an entire load, Walls said.
Alan Schumacher, City Carton’s plant manager in Cedar Rapids, said Wednesday that City Carton charges the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency and its members $10 a ton for clear container glass and $40 a ton for colored container glass.
In the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2010, the agency reports that it shipped 252 tons of clear glass and 255 tons of green colored glass to City Carton, the cost to the agency of which would be $12,720 at the rates that City Carton currently charges.
Schumacher and Joe Hummel, City Carton’s non-fiber marketing specialist in Iowa City, both said the company pays more to ship recycled glass to a refinery in St. Louis, Mo., than the refinery pays it for the glass.
Schumacher said City Carton continues to handle glass at its Cedar Rapids operation because its contract with the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency requires it to do so. Beyond that, Schumacher said the firm sees itself as a full-service recycler, and he said the public expects such an operation to handle container glass. At the same time, working with glass causes risk to employees, increases insurance costs and is hard on equipment, he added.
Cedar Rapids’ Jones said that city of Cedar Rapids pays an extra $8,000 or so per recycling truck to install side compartments that handle clear glass and colored glass separately. No longer picking up glass at the curb would let the city install an automated arm on the side of the truck and let the city move toward a fleet of trucks in which each truck could pick up garbage, yard waste or recyclables depending on the task at hand, he said.
Charlie Kress, the city of Marion’s representative on the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Board, noted this week that one of the missions of the agency is to divert as much as possible from the landfill to extend the life of the facility. Tom Podzimek, the board’s chairman and a Cedar Rapids City Council member, wasn’t eager either to simply put glass now recycled into the landfill. Karmin McShane, the agency’s executive director, talked of other agencies that crush the glass locally and use it at the local landfill to, for instance, fill in ditches.
Dubuque’s Schultz said the city of Dubuque, as is the case in Iowa City and Marion, still instructs residents about places where they can drop off container glass if they choose to do so. The plan is to crush container glass dropped at the landfill in Dubuque for use in subsurfaces on site, he said.
Schultz said there is limited concern in Dubuque that less recycled container glass will work to more quickly fill up the Dubuque landfill. He said the Dubuque landfill takes in about 100,000 tons of material a year, which dwarfs the 300 tons of glass that had been captured via recycling. He noted, too, that some portion of the recyclable glass was bottles that could have been returned for deposit. In addition, an analysis of garbage going into the landfill found that about 5,000 tons already going in during a year was comprised of glass that could have been recycled.
Even so, Dubuque’s Schultz said that a community needs to spell out the reason to the public if it decides to take a step like ending the curbside recycling of glass. For the last 20 years, people taught their children to recycle glass, and now they must ask themselves if they were wrong to do that, he said.
Schultz said Dubuque’s reputation as a “sustainable” community helped it convince the public that ending the curbside pickup of glass made sense.
“People could trust that this wasn’t just some sort of abandonment or something because we just didn’t want to do it,” Schultz said. “We felt we could do this and not have a blood bath with the public.”
