April 21, 2006
Empty bottle can be an end or a beginning
Don Cox
An empty bottle.
It can be used again or become part of the nation's trash pile. It depends on the person who drank what was in the bottle. It's a simple decision. Toss it, or recycle it.
"The energy savings from recycling a single bottle powers a computer for 25 minutes," said Lynn Brown, spokeswoman for Waste Management, the Houston-based company that collects garbage in Northern Nevada and communities across the country. "We recycle more than one million tons of glass."
Somewhere in all that is the empty bottle, part of the 5.8 million tons nationwide of glass, aluminum, steel, plastic, cardboard, paper and other items recycled annually from Waste Management.
Saturday is Earth Day, when recycling is celebrated.
"A bottle can go from a recycling bin to a store shelf in about 30 days," said Conni Kunzler, a consultant for the Glass Packaging Institute in Alexandria, Va. "Hopefully, they become new bottles."
That's usually what happens to an old bottle. It becomes a new one, if it's recycled.
"Anything (glass) you drink or eat out of, we make it," said Tom Moreland, director of raw materials purchasing for Saint-Gobain Containers of Muncie, Ind., which, in a year, buys 585,000 tons of used glass, including the empty bottle from Northern Nevada.
Before Moreland gets the glass, somebody else had it.
The glass could be from any bottle. They all used to be full. One contained soda, another orange juice. One held 12 ounces of beer, Northwest Trail Blonde Lager made by the Full Sail Brewing Co., of Hood River, Ore., where all containers, bottles or boxes, are made from recycled glass or cardboard.
"It's all about reusing it," said Doug Cameron of Full Sail.
So, the empty bottle's glass already has been recycled, perhaps many times.
The process begins again, this time in Northern Nevada, if the bottle, instead of being thrown in the trash, is dropped in a green plastic crate or bin.
Across the country, bottles mostly go into the trash. Only about 20 percent of glass is recycled, according to statistics from the Container Recycling Institute in Washington, D.C.
In Northern Nevada, homes served by Waste Management usually have two, a green one for glass and a yellow one for aluminum cans and plastic containers.
Residents set crates by the curb where they're emptied into trucks operated by WM Recycle America, a company owned by Waste Management. The glass goes in one truck compartment, the aluminum and plastic in another.
"All colors of glass go together," Brown said.
The amber beer bottle is headed for recycling. It's taken by the truck to a Recycle America plant that occupies a 5-acre site in the industrial section of Sparks.
Bottles are dumped into a 15-foot concrete bunker. In the process of dumping, the glass is broken, another step in recycling.
Across the country, Waste Management recycles more than one million tons of glass annually, along with 2.5 million tons of newspaper, 1.7 million tons of cardboard, 30,000 tons of aluminum and 57,000 tons of steel cans.
The broken glass from what once were bottles in Northern Nevada, is taken by the truck load to another Recycle America plant in Madera, Calif., 18 miles north of Fresno.
That's where the glass, in pieces two inches or smaller, is sorted by color, clear in one pile, with amber and green in another. It's done optically.
Clear glass eventually is used to make clear bottles. Amber and green glass is mixed to make green bottles.
"There's a machine with a camera in it," said Dennis Hinson, regional manager for WM Recycle America. "The (glass) slides over a piece of glass in a single flow. The camera reads it. Amber will have a different transparency than clear or green."
The Madera plant has two camera machines.
When the glass is separated by color, it's sent to Saint-Gobain, which has factories around the country, including one in Madera on property shared with Recycle America.
The centuries old company, founded in Europe in 1565, once made mirrors for the palace of French kings. Today, Saint-Gobain, spends $32 million annually on broken glass that's melted and turned into bottles.
"It melts easier," Moreland said of recycled glass.
That allows Saint-Gobain to reduce the heat in its furnaces, saving energy. It takes higher heat to process sand, according to Moreland, the main ingredient in new glass.
"The more (recycled glass) we use, the better we can turn our furnaces down," he said.
Up to 95 percent of the glass in bottles made by Saint-Gobain is recycled. Some of it comes from Northern Nevada.
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