Crushed pieces of glass roll off a conveyer belt and into a big, colorful pile that smells a little like beer at Emmet County’s recycling facility in Harbor Springs.
“This is what our glass looks like before it goes to … Ohio, gets cleaned up, and then gets made as a feedstock for fiberglass production in Michigan,” says Lindsey Walker, showing a tour group around the facility.
Of all the things that people throw into a recycling bin, glass that can’t be or isn’t returned for a deposit is a pretty small part. It’s estimated to make up only about 4% of the waste stream generated in Grand Traverse, Leelanau and Benzie counties. But glass can be valuable, since there’s no limit to the number of times it can be recycled.
Despite that, Emmet County’s recycling program is an outlier in northern Michigan. Most glass containers that people drop off at recycling sites or put in their curbside bins here don’t get recycled.
“If I drop a wine bottle into the recycling bin here, that's going to be turned into roads in a landfill,” said Matt Flechter, a recycling market development specialist at Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy.
Glass that is returned at stores does get recycled.
But things like wine bottles, pickle jars, jam containers and glass bottles that aren’t returned to the deposit system — those mostly get crushed and used to build and maintain roads in landfills run by Green For Life Environmental, or GFL.
GFL’s Traverse City manager Mark Bevelhymer described recycling glass as “tough, tough, tough.”
Bevelhymer said the company tried recycling glass in the past but began using it as a gravel substitute in their landfills after discovering how challenging it was to clean the glass and find markets for it.
The upside of using glass instead of gravel? It’s one less resource to mine and pay for.
“If [GFL] can save more money by not buying gravel for their landfill, they're going to do that,” said Matt Flechter, with EGLE. “That's one of the challenges.”
Plus, the facilities which turn recycled glass into new bottles, fiberglass insulation, sandblasting material and many more products are far away from northern Michigan.
“Glass is heavy, so to get it all the way down to Detroit, it costs money and fuel,” Flechter said.
Aiming for a regional collection model
But some people see an opportunity to create a better ecosystem for glass recycling in our region.
Because of Emmet County’s dual-stream system, its glass is often less contaminated than the glass inside single-stream recycling systems like GFL’s. The tip-of-the-mitt county has found a recycling market for its glass and a way to get it there.
And the Toledo-area recycler it works with says it wants even more glass.
That company, Recycle Services, also does its own hauling. Right now, it eats the cost of transporting Emmet’s glass down to its facility because it’s banking on more glass coming in the future.
“Oftentimes, what we do is, we start the footprint. It may not be money-making at the beginning,” said Jim Richey, vice president of sales and development at Recycle Services.
He said the company sees Emmet County as a gateway to the rest of northern Michigan’s glass. Glass that’s now being used to build landfill roads could be a moneymaker for the company and for municipalities or other recyclers.
“You've got a large concentration of wineries up in that area. And those wineries are currently not really recycling their bottles,” Richey said.
He said the Upper Peninsula is also an “untapped market.”
That’s why the company is working on building out a “hub and spoke” model here. In this vision, Emmet County would serve as the hub – where trucks could drop off glass from other parts of northern Michigan, including the U.P. – to be picked up later. Richey said he thinks that could be a reality in the next year.
“We've got to start working on looking at surrounding municipalities, counties, glass collectors and just stringing those together to bring those back to Emmet County,” he said.
Back inside the Emmet County recycling facility, little robotic hammers crush bottles and jars before the pieces drop slowly down into a colorful mound of glass outside.
Many people are hopeful that soon, these hammers will work a little harder as more glass from across northern Michigan makes its way here to be recycled.
