Should the city end glass recycling?

CEDAR RAPIDS - It is as if city officials here are tiptoeing across broken glass, not talking about the recycling of it.

Even so, Pat Ball, the city's utilities director, and Mark Jones, the city's solid waste/recycling manager, said this week that they have begun to take a “cautious” look at the prospect of ending the curbside collection of glass containers as part of Cedar Rapids' weekly recycling program.

The reasons are several:

Cost: The city receives no revenue for the recycled glass and must pay its recycling company, City Carton Recycling, to take the glass. Meanwhile, City Carton pays more to ship recycled glass to a St. Louis, Mo., glass refinery than what the refinery pays for the material.

The trend: Many cities - including Iowa City and Marion and, most recently, Dubuque - don't collect glass at the curbside.

Future savings: Giving up on curbside glass collection will allow the city to eliminate special compartments for glass on its recycling trucks and add an automated arm to them. Such a change might allow the city to purchase the same design of truck that, interchangeably, can pick up garbage, yard waste and non-glass recyclables.

No matter the reasons for change, the city's Jones suspected Wednesday that the city will need to make its case to the public before it moves to modify one of the long-standing pieces of its curbside recycling program.

“Anytime you have a commodity that has been recycled for a while and diverted from the landfill, and all of a sudden you're sending it back to a landfill as one option, that does cause concern,” Jones said.

A decision by the city of Dubuque to drop its curbside collection of container glass for recycling is helping to prompt the city of Cedar Rapids to look at its program, the city's Ball told the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency Board, of which Ball and Jones are members. The agency is comprised of the communities in Linn County.

Paul Schultz, Dubuque's resource management coordinator, said Wednesday his city gave up curbside collection of glass July 1 with little or no public outcry, which he attributed to plentiful public discussion that preceded the change.

As of July 1, the typical Dubuque homeowner's monthly utility bill has dropped by 37 cents, Schultz noted, to reflect the $100,000 or savings he projects for the city's solid-waste operation because it no longer picks up glass.

In the end, more energy was expended in getting the recycled glass to a refinery south of Chicago than the energy saved by using recycled glass to make new glass or glass products, he said.

In Iowa City, Rodney Walls, assistant solid waste superintendent, said that city's recycling operation stopped picking up glass containers at the curb years ago because it made more sense to use one of the compartments on the city recycling trucks for magazines, rather than glass.

The reasons were many: Glass didn't provide the city any revenue; it put workers and residents at risk; and once in a while someone would toss in colored glass with clear glass or vice versa and contaminate an entire load, Walls said.

Alan Schumacher, City Carton's plant manager in Cedar Rapids, said his company charges the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency and its members $10 a ton for clear glass and $40 a ton for colored glass.

In the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2010, the agency reports that it shipped 252 tons of clear glass and 255 tons of green colored glass to City Carton, the cost to the agency of which would be $12,720 at the rates that City Carton charges.

Schumacher said City Carton continues to handle glass at its Cedar Rapids operation because its contract with the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency requires it to do so. Beyond that, Schumacher said the firm sees itself as a full-service recycler, and he said the public expects such an operation to handle container glass. At the same time, working with glass causes risk to employees, increases insurance costs and is hard on equipment, he added.

Charlie Kress, the city of Marion's representative on the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Board, noted this week that one of the missions of the agency is to divert as much as possible from the landfill to extend the life of the facility.

Tom Podzimek, the board's chairman and a Cedar Rapids City Council member, wasn't eager either to simply put glass now recycled into the landfill. .

Schultz said Dubuque's reputation as a “sustainable” community helped it convince the public that ending the curbside pickup of glass made sense.

“People could trust that this wasn't just some sort of abandonment or something because we just didn't want to do it,” Schultz said.