Why isn't glass collected in curbside recycling programs?

The short answer – glass breaks. And when it's mixed with other recyclables, broken glass degrades and contaminates those materials, reducing their utility and causing them to be discarded or "downcycled" into lower-quality products. What's more, in most curbside programs in which glass is collected along with other recyclables, over half of the collected glass is unsalvageable, and ends up in the landfill. This leaves two options: sorting and segregating glass in existing recycling trucks, or running dedicated routes for glass. In both cases, the costs outweigh the value of the material, making curbside pickup economically unsustainable.

Do I have to separate glass by color?

No, you don't! All brown, green, blue and clear food and beverage containers can be mixed together in the same collection bin.

Do I need to take the labels off?

Nope. You can leave all the labels on your containers, unless you're into label peeling for some reason.

Do I have to rinse the containers?

Well, that would be nice. But it's not essential. You may, however, decide that rinsing the containers keeps your home or garage smelling a bit fresher.

Why are Ripple Glass bins purple?

We wanted them to be attractive and distinctive, and we couldn't figure out how to tie-dye 'em.

Can I put window glass in the bin? What about Pyrex or old coffee mugs?

Ripple Glass cannot accept plate glass (windows), mirrors, Pyrex, Corning ware, ceramics, dishes, or ham sandwiches.

We can accept all glass food and beverage containers, of any color (including mason jars).

Why doesn't Boulevard take back their used bottles and refill them?

Great question! Boulevard distributes its beer in over a dozen states. No mechanism exists to collect the 25+ million bottles sold each year. Even if it did, the costs – and environmental impact – of transporting all those empty bottles back to Kansas City make the proposition impractical, and distinctly un-green. (That's before considering the need to clean and sterilize the bottles to make them fit to reuse, a process that would use enormous amounts of energy and generate large streams of effluent.) And last but not least, a solution that involved only Boulevard bottles would leave the vast majority of glass generated in the KC area unaccounted for, and destined for the landfill.

How do you create a useful product out of what used to be waste material?

Put simply – hard work and technological wizardry. But if you want a little more detail:

It all starts with you and your neighbors, depositing empty glass bottles and jars into those strikingly handsome purple collection bins. When a bin gets full, a local company picks it up, brings it to our processing plant, and dumps it into our receiving bunkers. Our operators feed the glass onto a conveyor, where it goes through a number of stages: decontamination (removal of all large non-glass materials), an initial crush to reduce whole containers into smaller pieces, drying, optical sorting (the wizardry part), fine grinding (size really does matter) and screening (guaranteeing size distribution matches customer specifications). The finished material – furnace-ready cullet – waits in silos to be loaded into trucks for transportation to our customers' nearby facilities.

What is glass cullet?

Glass cullet is the fancy term for glass that is cleaned, crushed and ready to be processed into new products including glass containers, fiberglass, reflective paints, abrasives, aggregates, and more. At Ripple Glass, we turn your recycled glass containers into cullet for a number of local customers, most notably Owens Corning, which uses it to make fiberglass insulation.