This February, WashU officially became the host of a Ripple Glass collection site. This exciting new addition offers WashU and the surrounding community a new and high-impact option to recycle their glass bottles and jars.
Glass is a 100% recyclable material, and it can be endlessly recycled without loss in quality or purity. However, hundreds of tons of glass from the St. Louis area end up in landfills every day. Even when glass is recycled in single-stream/commingled bins, there’s a chance that the materials won’t complete the recycling process. In the United States, only about 40% of glass in single-stream recycling actually gets recycled.
Glass recycling saves energy and minimizes the need for raw materials. Compared to making new glass, recycling glass reduces air pollution by 20% and cuts water pollution by 50%. For every ton of glass recycled, over a ton of natural resources are conserved including 1,300 pounds of sand, 410 pounds of soda ash, 380 pounds of limestone, and 160 pounds of feldspar.
Ripple Glass is a Missouri-based business offering circular solutions to keep glass out of landfills. By separating out glass at the source, Ripple Glass’s collection method has a 98% recovery rate – the remaining 2% is just the caps, labels, lids and corks. Ripple offers free, public drop-off bins throughout Kansas City and St. Louis where anyone is welcome to recycle their glass.
Once full, the bins are transported to Ripple’s processing facility on the North St. Louis Riverfront. After the glass is sorted, crushed, and cleaned, it is sent to Ardagh in Pevely, MO where it is manufactured into new bottles for local bottlers like Anheuser-Busch, Fitz’s, Excel Soda, and others. Recycled glass also goes into fiberglass installation, countertops, and more. With this system, Ripple Glass reduces transportation needs and keeps the recirculated materials local.
How To Recycle Your Glass
The Ripple Glass dumpster is located on WashU’s West Campus parking lot at 7421 Forsyth Blvd, University City, MO, 63130. Look for the purple dumpster located along the west side of Forest Park Parkway.
Another bonus with Ripple’s special recycling collection is that they accept a wider array of glass materials than single-stream recycling, including candles, drinkware, plate glass, and cosmetic glass. At this time, lab glass is NOT recyclable in this collection stream. Be sure to review what IS and IS NOT accepted below.
Q&A
At the St. Louis plant, Ripple Glass cleans, dries and crushes the glass to about a .25-inch size which is called furnace-ready bottle cullet. That cullet is sorted into one of 2 color piles: flint (clear) or amber (a mix of brown and green). After that, its ready to go to local manufacturers and on to bottlers and other local uses.
Ripple’s equipment can only process clean, source-separated glass like what comes in through the purple collection dumpsters.
Glass from single-stream/mixed recycling is often contaminated when it leaves the MRF (Materials Recovery Facility). Glass is the last thing to get sorted out and is mixed with all the other small bits of materials after the sorting process takes out the metals, plastics, and paper. What’s left needs very advanced equipment to be able to extract any useful glass.
There can be up to 40% NGR (Non-Glass Residue) in what comes out of the MRF, and then of the 60% left that is glass, only a fraction of that can be salvaged for re-use. Those numbers can fluctuate, but it is never clean enough for the applications available locally. In the past, single-stream glass in St. Louis was going to the landfill where it was used to repair roads or used as alternate daily cover. Now, local recyclers send recycled glass to the Strategic Material facility in Chicago where it is used to make abrasives and reflectives (like sand blasting beads). However, this is not the best solution since the glass doesn’t stay local and can’t use it for new bottles or fiberglass, but it is better than the landfill. Note: not all MRFs produce “bad glass” – some regions have newer advanced glass cleanup systems.