Recycle right
Want to make sure your glass is getting recycled? For the time being, don’t mix it with other recyclables in a single-stream container in Chattanooga, East Ridge or Signal Mountain. Instead, sort glass and drop it off at a Hamilton County or city recycling center. Orange Grove Center stores this pre-sorted glass in “bunkers” at its Derby Street campus and sells it for $9 a ton to Strategic Materials in Atlanta.
Since September, the city of Chattanooga has let residents recycle empty glass bottles and jars at the curb.
But the glass that Chattanoogans toss into their new, 96-gallon curbside containers winds up in the landfill. That’s because Orange Grove Center, the nonprofit organization for people with disabilities that has the contract to sort the city’s recyclables, isn’t equipped to remove broken glass from the curbside containers’ mix of paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, plastic bags and metal cans.
Glass is also landfill-bound from two other area cities that offer “single-stream” recycling, which is becoming the norm nationally because it’s more convenient for residents to put everything into one container than to sort their recyclables.
Glass goes to the landfill from East Ridge, where residents do single-stream recycling in curbside bins, and from Signal Mountain, where residents drop off their single-stream recyclables at the recycling center near City Hall on Taft Highway. Both cities have their single-stream recyclables processed at a materials recovery facility off South Market Street near The Howard School that’s owned by WestRock, formerly RockTenn.