Dive Brief:
- Alabama Environmental Council (AEC) has just resumed glass recycling with the opening of the Avondale Community Recycling and Resource Center. The facility accepts paper, cardboard, plastics, aluminum, and electronics and, now, residents can recycle glass again.
- Glass recycling services were temporarily discontinued due to a lack of space. The new relocated facility returns glass recycling to the region at about the time that AEC promised to deliver.
- The operation will be able to collect large volumes on site and load the material into trailers or pulverize it and sell it locally for reuse, according to an AEC release.
Dive Insight:
AEC had the only facility within five neighboring counties that could recycle glass until 2014. It was forced to stop receiving this hard-to-process material after Argos would no longer accept it at the Calera cement manufacturing facility.
On its website, AEC said at that time, "Our only option to continue recycling glass was to attempt to transport it to markets in Georgia and Tennessee due to space and equipment limitations. There are expensive logistics of collecting, storing, transferring, and transporting glass out of state. Unfortunately, this was not sustainable, and we stopped the program."
Glass recycling was also recently brought back to Kansas City. And more municipalities are finding ways to include this material in their stream. But to be able to receive and process glass requires an investment in equipment as well as time and effort to find the right market. Companies like Clear Intentions and Rumpke say they are finding glass to be lucrative.
