a deposit on it—the used pickle jars, peanut butter containers and wine bottles that Portlanders (and residents of other Oregon cities) put in our glass-only bins each week? None of those are collected by OBRC. And what do rural Oregonians who don’t have curbside recycling do with their used glass bottles? I’d heard whisperings that much of that glass ends up in landfill, since low-income Oregonians can’t afford to pay additional fees for recycling services—and some can’t easily drive to recycling depots. If that’s true, then glass, I realized, is not the environmental best choice many of us think it is. It takes a lot of energy to make. Glass cullet, limestone, sand and soda ash are heated to 2,600 to 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit; the process of making glass emits toxic pollution; and it’s heavy, which means it’s both expensive and puts more carbon into the atmosphere to truck it across the country. According to a 2014 study commissioned by the Wine Institute in California, glass bottles account for 29% of wine’s carbon footprint—the single biggest factor. (That’s not even factoring in that some winemakers order their glass bottles from China.) Wanting to get to the bottom of where and how Oregon’s glass is recycled, I first called Bob Hippert, Sustainability Strategy Leader at O-I Glass, the Ohio company that owns Oregon’s only glass furnace. Hippert confirmed that all the glass that OBRC collects at six of its processing plants around the state is crushed, then taken to an O-I subsidiary, Glass to Glass, where the cullet is sorted into three different color streams: amber, green and clear. Typically, the sorted cullet is sent to the O-I Glass plant, five miles down the road, but since midsummer, that facility has been on a “hot hold.” (Hippert says that’s due to a lack of interest from the Oregon wine industry in recycled-glass wine bottles, which is what the plant typically makes.) Instead, the amber and green cullet is currently going up to O-I’s facility in Kalama, Wash., 45 minutes north, where it’s used to make green wine bottles. Currently, the flint (clear) cullet is being shipped to out-of-state O-I plants—typically in California and Colorado—and remade into glass bottles there. Hippert sings the praises of OBRC, which recovers 45,000 tons (90 million pounds) of glass from Oregonians every year. “Oregon is the best state in the country as far as recycling glass,” he tells me. “I wish I had 50 Oregons around the country. We wouldn’t be struggling to hit some of our aspirational goals when it comes to recycled content.” When Portland’s O-I Glass plant was operational, it made bottles with 70% recycled glass — a very high percentage. (The industry average in recycled glass bottles is nearly 40%.) Lange Estate Winery in the Willamette Above left: An employee picks out trash and non-glass material from the stream coming into the plant. Above right and below: Green glass shards. Glass to Glass facility in North Portland 27
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