Your recycling sounds very similar to ours. Recycling in this area is very popular. There's a lot of support for it. Our trash collection is a little different. Ages ago ... we had two landfills here on the island. The landfills were closed and re-purposed into transfer stations.The household trash goes into a big compactor. When the " roll away " container is packed full, it's trucked off to an incinerator about 40 miles away.
The recycling is done in a similar way. There's a roll away with partitions in it. We do cardboard, newsprint, #1 & #2 plastics, glass containers, and so on. When the roll away is full ... that gets trucked off island to a large recycling center.
It's a bit more involved because there are so many other things we recycle, but, that's the short version.
The beverage container recycling center we have at work is an entirely separate thing. The beverage containers have either a 5 cent or 15 cent bottle deposit on them. The machines are quite safe. We have one machine that does plastic bottles and aluminum cans. The other machine does glass. You feed your bottles in. When you're done ... you press a button ... the machine totals everything up and prints a ticket. You take your ticket and redeem it at the store for cash.
One fulla i know made an extra 140.00 USD with the ones he brought in. Not bad pay for a rainy day when there was nothing else for work going on.
If you research the Tomra RVM's ( reverse vending machines ) you can see that it's a global company. They have machines in operation all over the world. The money making aspect of it is nice because it adds an extra incentive to recycle. There's also better quality control of the recycled product that they produce. The glass has very few contaminants.
My feeling about glass right now is that it would be better to re-purpose or landfill it locally.It's energy intensive to produce but it's also energy intensive to transport crushed glass. That stuff is wicked heavy. The carbon footprint to truck it back to the glass factory for reuse must be pretty big.
I know i've used crushed glass on municipal construction projects. It seems to work as well crushed stone for providing road drainage. I think it could be used in place of sand if it were ground a little finer. There's more than enough demand for crushed stone and sand here. All of the recycled glass that we produce would barely put a dent in that market.
~ Just a thought. ~
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