Glass collection options shift in Pacific Northwest

Glass is well known in the industry as both easy and challenging to recycling – easy from a technical sense and challenging logistically. That was recently highlighted by multiple developments in western Washington.

End markets, especially for bottle-to-bottle applications, are limited and sometimes unstable. When glass packaging giant Ardagh idled its Seattle container plant earlier this year, the ripple effects were felt throughout the region. Strategic Materials temporarily scaled back the amount of uncontracted volumes it accepted, and several neighboring cities suspended glass recycling programs.  

The city of Seattle said in a press release that the closure “created unprecedented challenges for glass recycling in Seattle and neighboring jurisdictions.”

The city is sponsoring a Glass Recycling Roundtable to develop short- and long-term solutions, supporting innovation and collaboration around alternative uses and end markets, and is working with Strategic Materials.

“Businesses and residents in Seattle should still continue to put glass bottles and containers in their recycling carts,” the press release stated. 

A Strategic Materials representative said on Nov. 25 via email that “while we’ve been presented with short-term, local end-market challenges, we remain fully committed to providing the Pacific Northwest with a glass recycling solution for the long-term.” 

“We are working diligently to expand end-markets both within and outside of the region,” the statement said. “We’ve already made encouraging strides, and it is our hope to begin accepting all available glass in the early part of the new year. Our Seattle facility is fully operational and has not stopped processing glass.”

The Seattle Public Utilities press release added that Strategic Materials is developing new customers and diversifying its end markets to meet the changing demands, as well as renting temporary storage space from the city to stockpile clean glass “as it secures new customers.”  

At the same time of the Seattle-area challenges, Ridwell, a company known for providing subscription collection service for hard-to-recycle materials, made inroads in the glass space in nearby communities.

Project emerges to fill a void

The Washington cities of Tacoma and Olympia, about 30 and 60 miles south of Seattle, respectively, are among the communities to end curbside glass recycling in recent years. 

Both areas have been providing non-curbside options for the material: In Olympia, the city collects glass at drop-off locations, said Kim Johnson, a city residential waste education representative, and that is sent to local company Concrete Recyclers to be used as aggregate material in construction projects. Thurston County (where Olympia is located) Public Works also collects glass at drop-off locations and sends it to Concrete Recyclers “to put that glass to good use,” said Kelly Fujimoto, Thurston County Public Works spokeswoman.

“They repurpose the material, which has been our standard practice for quite some time, long before Ardagh’s Seattle facility closure,” Fujimoto added. 

Tacoma and its surrounding Pierce County also maintain drop-off options, and although Tacoma’s drop-off program was disrupted by the Ardagh closure, Pierce County recently reported its “recycling partners have found an alternative regional glass processor south of Pierce County so glass collected in our system is still being recycled.”

Now, at the same time as the regional challenges, a curbside option is also returning to those communities. Culminating a project that was in the works for multiple years, Ridwell has added glass to its collection list in Tacoma and Olympia, supplying the material to a Portland, Oregon-based O-I facility and to Strategic Materials. 

Founder and CEO Ryan Metzger told Resource Recycling that Ridwell has been getting customer requests to add glass to the subscription pickup service, ever since the cities ended curbside glass pickup.

“We’ve been hearing about it for some time,” he said. 

The company chose Strategic Materials in Seattle and O-I in Portland in order to make sure there was a backup plan if one partner had to take downtime, Metzger added. 

“Sometimes partners can be full or have some challenges on their own end with capacity with categories that can be unstable,” he said. “It’s important to have contingencies so you can fill the gaps that way. We try to line that up in advance.” 

Metzger noted that the timing of the Ardagh closure and Ridwell launching its service was happenstance.

Company experiments with collection logistics

Ridwell has been working out the logistics of glass collection for some time, he said, and ran a pilot project with about 100 customers several months ago to test the padded tote bags they selected for collection. 

“We just saw that there was a lot of interest,” he said. “It was fun to experiment. I was doing it in my home. We tried different types of material – crates, bags, boxes.” 

The padded tote was the right size and material for the biweekly collection system, Metzger said, allowing customers to fill it but for employees to safely collect it as well. The company is also trying something new with this glass collection – allowing people to sign up only for glass collection for $10 per month.

Typically, a base subscription includes a handful of items with the ability to add on other materials for an extra monthly fee, but Metzger said there was enough interest in just glass for the company to try the new format. Existing customers can add glass to their subscription for $5 per month. 

“Hopefully people will try that and see that they are making a big impact and try some other categories,” he added.  

Metzger said the company made the initial investment in the tote bags and added to its van fleet, as now routes have to be a little shorter to account for the extra volume and weight that glass brings. Ridwell is also investing in storage space, he said. 

The first collection bags were delivered on Nov. 14, so the program is still rolling out. Metzger said while he doesn’t yet have an estimate for how much glass Ridwell will collect, the pilot collected 3,500 pounds from 96 people over six weeks, so “as we go more broad, I would think we could get in the hundreds of thousands of pounds pretty quickly.”

“We’re grateful to the people who participate in our pilot and are signing up,” he said. “It’s really how we can make a difference.”