NEW YORK, NY March 10, 2003 — A joint mayoral and council task force is expected to issue a report today on how the city can improve recycling. The task force was formed last year, when the city suspended glass and plastic recycling, in an attempt to save money. Plastic recycling is likely to start again this summer; one company has offered to PAY the cash-strapped city for the material. But the return of glass is proving to be more difficult, and costly. WNYC's Amy Eddings explains why.

At first glance, glass seems easily recyclable. Like metal, it can be endlessly remelted, without losing any of its properties. Like plastic, it can be used in innovative ways, as sandblasting medium or glassphalt or paint. But it's got big problems, too. Unlike metal, paper and plastic, glass breaks.

Carmen Cognetta: When it breaks, it gets into everything else that's collected with it. So it gets into the plastic, it gets into the metal.

And, says Carmen Cognetta, glass lowers the price of whatever it contaminates. Cognetta has immersed himself in all things recycling. He's a legal advisor to the City Council's sanitation committee, and a member of the Recycling Task Force.

Cognetta: What has happened in the past is, you know, we never looked at it as a city, you know, what is glass, where can it be recycled, what do we need to make it recycled. We just said, here's the contract, take our glass! And we didn't worry about it until it got out of hand.

And it got out of hand last year, when it became more expensive to recycle than it did to throw the stuff away. Cognetta says part of the reason why this happened was because of glass contamination; recycling companies were finding it harder to locate buyers. And a lot of the glass that was supposed to be recycled was ending up in landfills, anyway, rejected by bottle manufacturers who require clean, color-separated, glass. Joseph Catteneo is president of the Glass Packaging Institute, which represents bottle manufacturers.

Catteneo: Quality, in making glass .it's a recipie. If you make glass, you're mixing sand, soda, ash and limestone, and culotte, which is the term for recycled glass. Now, if you add in the culotte, if it's not correct, it will cause damage to the furnace that everything's put into and melted into.

Cattaneo says there is a market for the city's culotte .but only if it's sorted by color: amber, green, and clear glass, which is also called flint. In many suburban communities, citizens sort glass into different bins. In Europe, glass gets sorted at community collection centers. These options aren't discussed much here -- sanitation officials and recycling advocates seem to think they're unrealistic. So, the burden of color-sorting New York City's glass is on the processing side of the recycling stream. And Kerry Martin, eastern regional manager for Recycle America Alliance's container recycling group, believes the high-tech equipment at the company's Newark, New Jersey facility can do the job.

Martin: It looks like garbage, doesn't it?

Martin pushes his boot into what appears to be a large mound of .trash. But this is deceptive. A lot of paper, plastic, and food has already been removed by the private recycling vendors and municipalities who bring their glass here.

Martin: By weight, there's a lot of clear glass in here. This is what this is actually real good stuff, we like this. (Laughs.)
Eddings: I'm seeing orange rinds I'm seeing lots of plastic tops.
Martin: Well, you've got aluminum cans, you've got plastic bags, you've got silverware. We could set every table in southern Jersey, in the course of three weeks here, probably, with all the silverware we get in this?

To get a good price for this recycled glass, Martin's company must clean it up even more. Vacuums suck up the orange rinds and plastic tableware. Ceramics and Pyrex glass are screened out. They melt at higher temperatures, and can ruin a kiln. The remaining chunks of glass zip past a bank of cameras.

Martin: Whatever camera that piece of glass, whether it's green, brown or flint, falls in front of, that camera identifies it, sends a signal to the computer, and it sends a signal to the air jets where it blows out that piece of glass, over to brown, over to clear, over to green.

What comes out, at the other end, is between 95 and 99 percent pure flint or amber, or green. Prices fluctuate, depending on the market, and the color, but Martin says the company can get as much as $65 a ton for flint. Asked if that price was worth the cost of sorting it through four million dollars' worth of equipment, Martin didn't say exactly.

Martin: Well, I would say, to start with, it's part of our core business. We're in the business to recycle. And it may not be the most profitable business, but we do it because it's the right thing to do.

And because Recycle America Alliance, and its parent company, Waste Management, believe high-tech color sorting is the future of glass recycling. Many communities nationwide are trying to cut costs and are moving toward what's called single stream recycling -- putting everything in one truck. Waste Management and the Alliance have invested more than $25 million dollars in the last four years on optical sorting technology. Company officials say they'd love to get their hands on the city's glass and they've tried. Waste Management used to take some of Brooklyn's recyclables. Bill Richardson, director of the Alliance's container recycling group, says it would've taken millions of dollars' worth of equipment just to get New York City's glass to the orange-peel-and-plastic-silverware stage.

Richardson: We did come up with a system to clean up that three mix glass enough so that we could carry it over to Newark and it just became a situation that we felt -- we meaning Waste Management -- that we were not in a situation to spend the money to do that.

Richardson says the five-year contracts the city typically offers recycling vendors discouraged Waste Management from making the investment.

Some recycling advocates think the expense of high-tech glass sorters isn't worth it. They think the city would be better served by finding markets for its mixed, broken glass, just the way it is. In Broome County, in central New York State, Kevin Roche, the deputy commissioner of public works and solid waste, uses ground up, mixed glass in civil engineering projects.

Roche: We were buying aggregate stone for several different applications, for pipe fill material, for drainage media, for filter media, for traction media. We were also buying stone for road base material. And we started looking for ways to substitute glass for those applications. For the division of solid waste, it has worked quite nicely.

Roche says the county gets the mixed glass for free from its recycling vendors, saving the five dollars a ton it would spend on gravel. Those vendors have a guaranteed market -- the county -- and they save on shipping costs, Roche says, because the glass is being used locally.

So, since the Bloomberg Administration has vowed to bring back glass recycling in July, 2004, what avenue should it pursue -- high tech colored glass sorters, or alternative uses for mixed glass in city construction projects? Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty.

John Doherty: Do whatever you can do, as long as it doesn't cost money. And glass costs money, so, if they can improve that, fine, but it costs money to recycle glass, and I think it's a waste of time.

But industry observers say it's not about making glass recycling free. It's about making it cheaper than trucking it to the nearest landfill. And Carmen Cognetta says that's what the Recycling Task Force is trying to do.

Cognetta: We're looking at it more as a commodity, how do you sell it, how do you market it, what do you do with it. And I think that's the way we have to look at it in the future. Not just something to throw away.

Cognetta says that, in the short term, the city might look into creative joint ventures to keep costs down when glass is brought back next year. In the long term, he says, the city may have to consider collecting glass separately or, at least, differently.

In the meantime, glass is being thrown away, and, ultimately, the Task Force's report may do little to alter that. Its recommendations are just that -- recommendations. What the city chooses to do in these tough fiscal times may have little to do with the Task Force's report. For WNYC, I'm Amy Eddings.