Road tested, budget approved

New Hanover’s recycled glass goes to the local landfill, but it isn’t wasted

Also see:
2004 Outstanding County Program Award winners

By Jason King
Information and Communications Specialist

The roads at the New Hanover County Landfill are paved with glass.

Garry Moore uses a loader to first drop container glass onto a concrete pad and then pour the crushed glass onto the vibrating screen, which allows small-sized glass pellets to fall through into the container. The material is then hauled to the landfill for use as road base. (Photo by Jason King)

The county’s glass recycling program, which has historically broken even or lost money due to the cost of trucking the material up the road to Raleigh, is now on firm ground thanks to the creative thinking of a team of employees at the Department of Environmental Management.

The team developed a method of crushing and filtering the 500 tons of glass collected by the county each year at its six recycling drop-off locations. The smooth, crushed glass is put to use as road base at the 400-acre landfill.

Considering the cost of crushed rock that the county must buy to use as road base at the landfill, plus the amount of time and money the county spent hauling recycled glass to a collection outlet in Wake County, New Hanover is saving a substantial amount by using the program – more than $8,700 in its first year of operation. The savings will likely only increase in subsequent years, due to the one-time costs and the rising price of fuel and labor.

Solid Waste Planner Jason Hale, one of four county employees who worked to get the program off the ground, said another benefit to the program is that less glass ends up in the landfill. One out of every five loads of material hauled 136 miles to the collection facility was being downgraded, and another 20 percent was being rejected and sent back to the county, where the glass ended up in the landfill.

“Now we never get downgraded or rejected because we use it all in-house,” Hale said.

Because the landfill’s roads aren’t picky like the people at the collection facility who buy recycled glass, the county isn’t limited to only taking container glass, such as drink bottles. Anything that breaks like glass – porcelain toilet bowls, Pyrex dishes – can be used as road base. The county still asks citizens to sort their recyclable glass, however, in case the market price rises and it becomes profitable for the county to again begin shipping materials to Raleigh.

“It really is about maximizing the economics of the program,” Hale said. As far as the process, Hale described it as “insanely easy.”

Environmental Management Director Ray Church, Hale, Supervisor James Thomas and Operator Garry Moore put their minds together in 2003 to develop a method of using the glass internally. After much thought, planning, trial and error, the team hammered out a simple method of transforming glass containers into a fine pile of smooth glass pellets. All that was needed was a loader, a concrete pad, a roll-off container, a make-shift screen to make sure the resultant material was of uniform size, two small vibrating motors, and around three hours per week of labor.

The glass is first piled on a concrete pad, where a loader operator will repeatedly scoop up the glass and drop it on the pad until it is finely crushed. The loader then picks up the material, and slowly pours it over a mesh screen that sits at an incline atop the roll-off container. The two motors vibrate the screen so the smaller pellets of glass fall through into the container. Moore welded the screen together using scrap metal, mesh and other material the county had on-hand. The total start-up cost came to $1,200.

County Landfill Manager Steve Edens approved the material as an acceptable alternative to the aggregate rock the county purchases to stabilize the roads at the landfill, and the new program was off and running.

Pender County, which neighbors New Hanover to the north, was considering scrapping its glass recycling program due to prohibitive costs. After learning of New Hanover’s program and talking with environmental officials, Pender began shipping its glass to New Hanover for inclusion in the program in October 2004, providing one county with substantial savings and another with more material to use as road base.

“Right now we can use every bit of it,” Hale said of the arrangement with Pender.

Recycled glass in aggregate form has found its way into a number of different uses across the world. When crushed to rock size, the glass can fill landscaping needs. When pulverized, it can be used to replace sand in filtration or sandblasting systems.

A few local New Hanover artists have also stopped by the county Waste-to-Energy Conversion (WASTEC) Facility to scoop up a few buckets’ worth of material.

“If it catches the light just right, it’s kind of pretty looking,” Hale said.

For more information on the program, contact Jason Hale, New Hanover County solid waste planner, at (910) 341-4373.