Roaming around his family farm near Nebraska City, Daryl Steinman discovered old bottles and jars in piles of charred debris. Brown, green, clear, some embossed with makers’ marks harkening back to before he was born in 1965.

He occasionally spotted blobs of melted glass, remnants left by homesteaders and farm families who had burned their trash before Steinman’s family bought the farm 65 years ago, he thought. They sparked a realization.

“If you don’t take care of the environment, just throwing stuff away into the ground, it’s always gonna be there,” Steinman said.

For years, Steinman’s only option was to cart trunkfuls of bottles and glass an hour’s drive away to Lincoln. There, the glass ended up in a bunker, where it was picked up by Ripple Glass, which processes it into a fine sand texture that becomes fiberglass or new Boulevard or Busch Light beer bottles.

But Steinman’s effort to recycle recently got easier. Since April, he’s been dropping his glass off 5 miles from home, at a Nebraska City parking lot — a new spot where the town’s 7,200 residents and those from surrounding areas can recycle their glass instead of dumping it in a landfill.

Nebraska City is one of roughly two dozen towns and cities in the state that now offer glass recycling — a practice that comes with environmental, and sometimes economic, benefits. But difficulties transporting it have forced some rural communities to scrap glass recycling, advocates say.

By one measure the recycling centers are seeing some success. The percentage of glass in Nebraska’s landfills — now 2% — is down by more than half from 2009, according to preliminary findings of a state study. The decline is a result of more recycling and less glass packaging, experts say.

But there’s still a long way to go: Only one out of every 11 glass jars and bottles used in Nebraska is then recycled, says a 2023 study commissioned by the packaging manufacturer Ball Corporation.

Fifty pounds of glass per Nebraskan goes into a landfill each year, taking up landfill space that’s becoming an increasingly valuable resource. This is happening even as neighbors like Iowa, which has a bottle deposit, have markedly more success at recycling glass and giving it a second life.

In Nebraska City, the newfound ability to recycle glass is largely the work of one woman: Steinman’s childhood friend Sally DuBois. Determined to give her friends and neighbors a place for their bottles to go, she launched the town’s new glass recycling service, sponsored in its first year by a local business, for about $3,200.

“I’ve watched glass recycling in Nebraska City, going really well for a long time, and then disappear, and then come back again and then disappear. So it’s nice to have something like this,” Steinman said.

Glass recycling in small towns has ebbed and flowed as food production, manufacturing and waste management all globalized — and consolidated. Steinman’s own father once worked as a milkman, taking glass to the customers’ doorsteps, collecting empty bottles and then bringing them back to the distributor. But that distributor is long gone, and now much of the glass on local store shelves comes from overseas.

Storing all this trash isn’t cheap. Nebraska landfills can take up hundreds of acres and cost millions of dollars to build, typically with investments from companies with serious financial backing.

Nebraska City’s trash goes to the Loess Hills landfill in Iowa. The city’s hauling contractor, American Recycling & Sanitation, a company based in Rock Port, Missouri, just negotiated a 7% rate increase for garbage collection.

Recycling glass isn’t easy either, but it can save a city serious money, according to Madeline Ferber, Omaha’s recycling coordinator.

The city of Omaha pays $42 to send each ton of glass to be recycled. But the same amount of glass, mingled with other trash, would cost the city $140 per ton to haul and dump at the landfill in Bennington.

By taking glass to the recycling drop-off locations, Omahans recycled roughly 1,650 tons of glass last year, saving the city more than $160,000, in addition to glass recycled by bars, restaurants and other businesses.

The 190-acre Bennington landfill can take trash for another 100-some years.

Its owner, Waste Management, owns or operates six of the country’s 10 largest landfills, according to Environmental Protection Agency data.

Waste Management often hauls waste from apartment complexes and bars with which it contracts directly. The company bills itself as the largest recycler in North America, often offering recycling collection services, though the company doesn’t own a recycling facility in Nebraska, a spokesperson said.

Convenience is a major factor in whether people choose to recycle, but curbside pickup for glass is rarely offered in Nebraska. The reason: Single-stream recycling, where you place all your cardboard, plastic containers and cans in the same place, doesn’t quite work for glass recycling yet.

Broken glass can also be a safety hazard, and when glass ends up in the mix of cardboard and plastic, it renders the recycled materials unusable, said Patrick Leahy, CEO of First Star Recycling, a local recycler.

Glass is hard on his machines, Leahy said. First Star finds buyers for other kinds of scrap materials all across the country. But glass, heavy and bulky, is expensive to transport, and goes to specialized regional dealers.

That’s why your salsa jars and wine bottles should be separated from other materials at the beginning of the process.

Many, like Steinman, think recycling is a habit you can’t quit.

Even after Lincoln reduced the number of glass recycling drop-off locations, the city saw an 8% increase in materials recycled, including glass.

Giving people the option to recycle also gives them some autonomy in the face of environmental challenges, said Kimberly Carroll Steward, executive director of the Nebraska Recycling Council, a nonprofit facilitating recycling.

“A lot of these big environmental issues … You were born into them. You didn’t really cause the problem as an individual, but you can be part of the solution,” she said.

Ripple Glass, founded by the owner of Kansas City-based Boulevard Brewing Co. and later acquired by North America’s largest glass recycler, can pick up glass for free from communities once the glass accumulates to 25 tons, said Franklin Rosario, a Ripple Glass regional manager.

Hauling heavy glass across state borders does generate carbon emissions, he said, but recycling can also save energy.

When recycled, pulverized glass requires much less heat to melt and reshape, he explained. And that cuts down carbon emissions compared to manufacturing glass from virgin materials.

A community of any size can start recycling glass, but those with a storage site and on a hauler’s route are more likely to take glass. The town of Stuart had been storing their glass for years before a recent pickup, Rosario said.

Last year, Plattsmouth opened the first glass recycling site in Cass County. Dana Stahl, executive director of Keep Cass County Beautiful, got funding from the Plattsmouth Community Foundation to set up the program.

She’s looking to expand to Eagle this month, on the opposite side of the county.

“Cass County doesn’t have its own landfill, so we’re carting off all this trash to David City, Nebraska, or Iowa, and we’re filling up other people’s landfills, you know?” Stahl said. “And so I think it’s important to divert as much as possible.”

The western part of the state is served by one man in Kimball.

Spud Rowley runs a business supplying recycling bins — plastic tanks in steel cages, reused from agrichemical storage — to towns and bars. These totes sit in alleys and get loaded up into his trucks. He stores much of the glass on his property in Kimball and then hauls it to a processing facility near Denver.

In just the first quarter, he collected 90,000 pounds of glass from Thedford, Alliance, Benkelman, Kimball, Hershey and Ogallala. The city of Sidney and Rowley recently formed a partnership that offers glass recycling as part of a monthly event.

The volume of recycled glass is growing, said Rowley, who’s also the executive director of Keep Kimball Beautiful. He’s in talks with nearby villages and towns, including North Platte, to expand his service areas.

In Hastings, waste administrators think the economics of dumping glass in the landfill roughly break even for the city.

Taking glass out of the landfill would save space for hazardous materials, but the city, which owns the landfill, would lose money, said Marty Stange, the city’s environmental director.

“If I put glass in there, it doesn’t do any harm to the environment because it’s inert. Now, does it take up some volume? Absolutely, but we get paid for that,” said Stange.

The city of Hastings has invested in recycling other materials where it makes sense, Stange said. But since the city doesn’t have a storage site, it would need to build a cement pad for storing the glass before it’s picked up.

“The problem with glass was there just wasn’t enough economic incentive … But if the equation changes, we want to do it,” he said.

Stange hopes for a local business to make use of the glass. That way, city leaders wouldn’t have to worry about the logistics of hauling.

Finding a creative way to make use of glass has worked elsewhere. After seeing no glass recycling options in New Orleans, two college students started a glass recycling company called Glass Half Full, which repurposes gravel and sand from ground-up glass for coastal restoration. It has processed more than 7 million pounds of glass.

Closer to home, the city of Tekamah grinds up the glass it collects locally.

In 2008, Nathan Lund, the city’s waste superintendent, was looking for ways to reduce the town’s solid waste by half, which the Nebraska Legislature had set as a 10-year goal back in 1992. With some federal funding, the city council bought a glass-grinding machine. It offers the crushed glass to residents for free.

Ground up in a sand-like texture, the glass can be mixed with asphalt and concrete for road construction, Lund said.

Tekamah also charges one of the highest prices in the country to take residents’ trash — $320 per ton. It incentivizes residents to recycle, Lund said. By 2010, with help from the glass crushing machine, Tekamah cut its solid waste by 50%.

Jaime Garcia has a vision for local recycled glass. Inspired by TikTokers in California, the 21-year-old from South Omaha realized that crushed glass can be made into sandbags in high school.

He remembered the Missouri River flood in 2019 that damaged parts of South Omaha and left relatives’ neighborhoods underwater. If only we had more sandbags, he thought.

“That idea kept lingering with me until this day,” he told Flatwater.

Garcia is working toward his civil engineering degree and hopes to work as an engineer for the city while making his sandbag plan a reality.

He’s already doing his part, regularly taking his siblings’ and parents’ glass containers to Omaha’s drop-off sites.

He also recently convinced some friends to recycle glass, telling them about the practical applications of recycled glass. He’s not above being a bit judgy: “I see you have glass in your trash, hmmmm,” he says to friends.

That mix of practical knowledge and tongue-in-cheek judgment has gotten some friends to change their minds, he said.

Now, Garcia asks those friends a different question when he sees them.

“How’s that recycling going?”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/nebraskans-throw-tons-of-glass-into-landf...