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Bottles of wine. Jars of spaghetti sauce. Jugs of hot sauce. If you live east of the Cascade mountains in Washington state, these used glass containers would likely just end up in your trash. That’s because there’s not a glass recycling facility east of the Cascades so municipal disposal services don’t collect glass.
But thanks to one group, Yakima-area residents can recycle their collected empty containers.
“Unfortunately, a lot of glass still winds up getting buried. But, we're doing what we can to change that,” said Ron Shaw, who heads up Yakima Recycles Glass.
For several years, the nonprofit has collected empty containers from Yakima-area residents.
The nonprofit hosts collection events, like one on Saturday that was in the Yakima Greenway Storage Yard parking lot. That day, volunteers processed all sorts of clean food, beverage and cosmetic containers.
“You don't have to take labels off. If it's a screw top bottle, and it's got an aluminum collar (or plastic), it's good if you get that stripped off. But if you can't or forget, we do that ourselves,” Shaw said.
The group can’t accept auto glass, TV screens, tempered glass or cookware.
Rodrigo Franco pulled up to the dropoff site with two giant, blue barrels full of glass.
“ I've been recycling, I don't know all my life. So all this glass, it just goes to waste. At least it can be recycled. Our home recycles everything,” Franco said.
That’s something he’s been teaching his 7-year-old daughter, Maya, who helped her dad prep all the glass.
“It was hard,” she said, adding that it’s “good” seeing her dad recycle.
Another Yakima resident with glass to drop off was Claire Bange. She moved to the area after living in Portland and Seattle, where it’s traditionally been easier to recycle glass.
“ I think what's really special about this event is that it's really accessible, right? It's right here in the heart of the community. And they're really accommodating,” Bange said.
For almost an hour, a steady stream of cars waited in a line that stretched out the parking lot. Empty containers go into a large shipping container. Volunteer Katy Scofield calculated people’s total glass dropoffs. Collecting recycled glass from these events or from industries, like wineries and breweries, isn’t the only thing the group does, she said.
“ We also try to upcycle glass,” Scofield said. “We have a bunch of whiskey containers that we're working on that came from a spilled truck, so the distillery can't use them. They're beautiful, beautiful glass. We're going to try to repurpose everything that's safe and then recycle the rest.”
When glass enters a landfill, it can take up to a million years to break down. Overall in the U.S., around 31% of glass produced in 2018 was recycled, according to the most recent Environmental Protection Agency data.
“Glass can be recycled endlessly. It's just made into other glass products,” Scofield said.
After the Yakima Recycles Glass collection events, the blue container is shipped to Basin Disposal in Pasco. Once Basin Disposal collects around 30 tons of glass, both from the Yakima and Walla Walla areas, it sends the glass to Glass to Glass, a recycler in Portland.
For the recycling, it costs about $700 to rent the shipping container and get it to Pasco, Shaw said. That’s covered by a suggested $5 donation per 25 pounds of glass.
The logistics can be challenging, Shaw said.
“It is really labor intensive. And it's important to make sure that you've got a recycling stream to send your collected glass to,” he said.
However, Shaw, who’s a project manager at Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic, said he loves an organizational challenge.
For a few years before the group started recycling glass, they’d pile the glass into SUVs and pickups and haul it to a glass pulverizer in Ellensburg that would turn the used glass into sand. But carting the glass off in personal vehicles wasn’t sustainable. So, when Shaw talked with a glass recycling group in Walla Walla, he helped pivot the Yakima group to its current plan.
In Wenatchee, Sustainable NCW organizers said they hope to model a similar program after Yakima Recycles Glass but logistics are still in the works, including grant funding. Leavenworth’s recycling center also ships glass to the Seattle area.
Not all collection events have so many people show up, especially if the weather is bad, Shaw said.
“ We have had some events where we had one car the whole day. Luckily, that was at a winery that gave us 3 tons of glass,” he said.
This Saturday’s event turned out to be more successful than he’d hoped. Volunteers gathered 4.3 tons of glass, he said.
“ It's gonna be a good year,” he said.
