Thinking Outside the Sandbox

Power to the Peeples is an exclusive Earth911 series written by Bob Peeples, our resident chemical engineer and Program Manager of Earth911’s sister site Beaches911. Bob combines his extensive knowledge of the environment and how things work with an off-the-cuff sense of humor.

Let’s start off with a fact: In 2006, the EPA reports that one-fourth of tires, although glass is accepted in most curbside recycling programs.

What’s Up?

So why does only one-fourth of our 10.2 million tons of waste glass per year see a return ride to the mill? Here’s two factors:

1. Separation of colors is necessary for using recycled glass in new bottles and jars. In other words, you can’t make brown beer bottles from recycled green wine bottles. It’s difficult to find a recycler that will handle mixed glass.
2. Glass cullet (or crushed glass) is easily contaminated by non-container glass or contaminants. One ceramic beer bottle can ruin an entire batch of otherwise recyclable cullet intended for manufacturing new glass bottles.

Where Else Can It Go?

One great way to use mixed glass cullet is for sand replacement, because sand is far more forgiving of poor quality cullet. Glass that is destined for landfills could be converted back to one of its primary ingredients, sand, and also address beach sand depletion. Have I mentioned that 75 percent of glass ends up in landfills?

There are a couple of ways that beach sand can be lost. In storms, sand will form mounds underwater known as sandbars that slow down waves and protect against further erosion. The sane will eventually be pushed back onto the beach, but this is a gradual process. Sand can also be transplanted to different parts of the beach through littoral (along the shoreline) transport, which is more permanent.

So what if a few beaches are missing some sand? Why do we care? Well, beach tourism is worth a lot of money to our economy.

• It is estimated that 31.7 percent of the U.S. GNP, almost $1.3 trillion, originated in coastal counties
• Foreign tourists spend about $80 billion of that, which results in a $26 billion tourism surplus
• 50 percent of the U.S. population lives and works in those same counties
• So, 150 million dry-landers pay the same tax dollar as 150 million in coastal counties receiving $8 each, just to ensure beaches continue stimulating their economy

So?

The answer to why we should use recycled glass to replenish beach sand may sound familiar: “It’s the economy, stupid.” But can turning recycled glass back into sand solve the problem entirely?

Let’s take Broward County, Fla., as a sample, seeing how its the 16th largest county in the U.S. Broward has 24 miles of shoreline that contribute about $8.4 billion to the local economy, so sand needs to be replenished. Meanwhile, Broward County collects about 9,000 tons of broken and mixed glass each year for recycling, and it would take 2.5 million tons of sand to nourish one 12-mile beach. Recycling more glass wouldn’t be the only answer, but it’s a good start.

The other option for replacing sand is neither cheap nor eco-friendly. If we dredge for offshore sand using a pump, we’re piling one microenvironment (from the water) on top of another (the shore) and affecting countless beach organisms in the process. Mining sand from inland sources wreaks havoc on our rivers and streams because the best beach sand is at the bottom of a river bed.

In terms of cost, beach nourishment runs anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million per mile of beach, meaning a cost of between $100 million and $150 million in Federal taxpayer money per year. How much of this could be subsidized if we recycled more than 25 percent of our glass containers?

It should be said again that even if we processed every used glass container that we can’t use for recycled container glass and converted it back to sand, it would come nowhere near the needs of our beaches. But it sure beats landfilling or incinerating, and it could mean 7.5 million tons of replacement sand. That would represent about $85 million worth of sand with substantially less cost to the environment.

So use Earth911 to find out where to recycle glass containers. You’ll keep it out of landfills and help our aquatic life at the same time.