Don't waste it

For years, Montanans have been clamoring for an opportunity to recycle their glass bottles and jars. You could see it in their eyes whenever someone tossed a beer bottle or mayonnaise jar into the garbage can - bewilderment followed by resignation.

Well, good news is around the corner. As we reported last week, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality has bought the state a glass "pulverizer" - a machine capable of rendering all the waste glass the state's consumers can generate into a safe sand or gravel-sized product that can be used for landscaping, making bricks or road underlayment.

But that is not the end of the story. While some Montana communities have massed mountains of glass ready for pulverizing, the Flathead hasn't even reached first base. According to Flathead County Solid Waste District superintendent Dave Prunty, the real problem is going to be getting the public to cooperate by sorting their glass and putting it into the proper bins.

This is no small matter. The county has been experiencing problems for years with recycling material in general, and with sorting at its green box sites in particular. Prunty said that time and again people have just dumped their household garbage into bins marked for paper, plastic or metal.

And, as he pointed out, once contaminated, everything in the bin goes into the landfill.

Montanans generate nearly 1.2 million tons of waste each year. About 15 percent of that is recycled by 12 companies across the state, and the rest ends up in landfills. More than half of the recycled material by weight is cardboard, followed by paper and aluminum.

Glass hasn't been recycled in Montana for a simple reason - money. Its weight drives up transportation costs, and its re-use value is relatively low. Glass recycling is more common in metropolitan areas, but Montana's wide-open spaces makes shipping waste glass costly.

More than 100,000 tons of waste is hauled to the Flathead County landfill each year, and with no end in sight for the rapid growth continuing across the valley, that figure will continue to climb. Building new landfills costs millions. DEQ's pulverizer was paid for with money from fines, and it will be operated by a nonprofit organization.

The pulverizer actually falls into the "reduce" and "re-use" categories of the Three R's of waste management, rather than "recycle." The bottles and jars will not be washed and used again but instead ground down for use as a different product. This will reduce the amount of waste going into the county landfill.

I would add a fourth R to this list - "responsibility." People need to cooperate, or else this glass pulverizer project will end up being a "pilot" project destined for the "dustbin of history." If you're going to use recycle bins, use them responsibly. Otherwise, don't use them at all.

For those concerned parents, teachers, friends and neighbors out there - it's important to continue to drive home the recycling message. As one elementary schoolteacher said, all you can do is keep teaching kids the importance of not being wasteful. A trip to the county landfill is an annual ritual for her class. Seeing a mountain of garbage does wonders for young children.