A Recycling Company Wants to Have a ‘Ripple’ Effect on Glass Recycling Rates in St. Louis, MO

The bottle maker Ardagh Glass melts the cullet, turning it into St. Louis classic bottles such as Busch and Schlafly.

SEATTLE (Waste Advantage): Glass is collected and processed by Ripple Glass, a Kansas City-based company that made its debut in St. Louis last year, hoping to divert bottles from the landfill and turn a profit. Despite being fully and endlessly recyclable, 28 billion glass bottles and jars are thrown in landfills every year in the U.S. And in the St. Louis region where recycling rates are low and trust in the recycling system is even lower, Ripple Glass wants to increase both.

“We want to give people an option if they want to recycle their glass in a circular way,” said Franklin Rosario, St. Louis metro manager with Ripple Glass. “You’re not going to get the exact same bottle you threw into our bin, but certainly a piece of it could be back on the shelf within a month. When glass comes in, it is sorted, dried and crushed. The end product known as cullet is sold to a bottle manufacturer around 30 miles south of St. Louis in Pevely.

The bottle maker Ardagh Glass melts the cullet, turning it into St. Louis classic bottles such as Busch and Schlafly. “The great thing about glass is that it’s heavy and it doesn’t travel very far, so it’s all going to stay here in this local market,” Rosario said. In the first year, over 140,000 pounds of glass was recycled at this facility, the only glass processor in St. Louis and the second in Missouri. By next year, Rosario expects that figure to more than triple when Ripple puts additional collection bins around town.

Courtesy: www.wasteadvantagemag.com

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