By Jess Daninhirsch | 90.5 WESA
When you recycle your glass bottles in Southwestern Pennsylvania, chances are, they’ll end up back on store shelves in about 30 days.
Allegheny County does a decent job with glass recycling, especially when it comes to cultivating a localized, circular economy, but experts say there is significant demand and room for growth.
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“I want people to know that recycling works,” said Sarah Alessio Shea, deputy director of the Pennsylvania Resources Council (PRC). “I think there’s a lot of conversation and concern that recycling does not work and that there’s not a value in doing it…But when you talk about paper, cardboard, aluminum, glass; these are all materials that can be recycled multiple times, if not endlessly. The economics is great. The environmental impact is amazing.”
Since 2019, PRC has collected over 4,230 tons of glass through their recycling programs, Shea said.
PRC works with more than 100 partners — including Michael Brothers Hauling & Recycling, CAP Glass, and Owens-Illinois which are among the local organizations supporting the region’s circular glass economy.
The life cycle of a glass bottle
Recycling and hauling companies receive raw materials from designated recycling locations, curbside pickup, PRC pickup programs or directly from consumers. These companies sort the glass and send it to another facility where it’s broken down, cleaned, and turned into cullet, which is the glassmaking material then sold back to manufacturers and commercial buyers.
Pittsburgh-based Michael Brothers Hauling & Recycling, established in 1973, is one of the companies that takes glass. It has four locations and partners with CAP Glass.
“Michael Brothers [provides] the transportation, the hauling, the logistics and the operations behind it, getting the glass from the sites out to CAP Glass who is ultimately processing that and making sure that the glass is separated out between each color that it has,” explained Boyd Jones, a business support manager at Michael Brothers.
CAP Glass, which serves Pittsburgh as well as Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland, operates multiple buildings at its recycling facility in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania — each completing a specific stage in the recycling process. The company’s primary focus is to provide cullet for companies like Ohio-based Owens-Illinois, which transforms it back into food and beverage containers.
Both Boyd Jones from Michaels Brothers and Chris Koontz who manages operations at CAP Glass, said there’s more demand for glass from commercial buyers than they can supply, and that the glass recycling industry could definitely grow if more people would recycle their glass.
Battling myths and misconceptions
Around 2019, glass curbside pickup was removed from the county’s recycling program, but it was added back to many municipalities in 2024. Shea said its removal from the program led many people to question the recyclability of glass, so PRC bolstered their own recycling programs to challenge that belief.
Shea said she often hears about myths surrounding glass recycling — most commonly about food residue and labels left on glass.
“ You want the material to be relatively clean. You don’t want it to be a half-filled jar of jelly, or full of peanut butter,” Shea said. “But if there’s a little bit of remnants, if there’s a label, the place that collects the glass and color sorts and cleans it up is able to manage a lot of those different things.”
Shea also said residents do not have to sort their glass by color because processors in the region have the capability to do that.
Bob Hippert, a sustainability strategy leader at the Ohio-based glass manufacturing company Owens-Illinois, said he also regularly hears myths that he wants to clear up.
For example, Hippert said if a jar still has a lid on it, that can still be recycled because facilities have the capability to remove the lids and recycle them in the proper manner.
Koontz said another common misconception is that there’s no real harm in putting glass in landfills since it’s not toxic.
“Keeping it out of the landfill saves space, especially for a product that is 100% recyclable,” Koontz said. “[Glass] has an infinite amount of times that it can be recycled, and it is deemed one of the safest storage containers out of all products.”
What Pennsylvania could be doing better
“If you are not recycling at home, please start,” Shea urged.
The glass recycling industry has a substantial footprint in Southwestern Pennsylvania, but it could grow if more people recycled their glass, Jones said. Koontz pointed out that Pennsylvania does not do as well with glass recycling as some neighboring states.
According to the Eunomia 50 States of Recycling report, Pennsylvanians recycled 44% of glass bottles and jars in 2021. The commonwealth is 18th in the country according to the common containers and packaging materials (CCPM) recycling ranking — lagging behind states that have CCPM-supportive legislation or a bottle bill (a container deposit law).
Both Jones and Shea said increasing awareness about glass recycling is among their primary goals. PRC offers educational programs and workshops, and Shea said she often finds herself reminding consumers to remember to think about the recyclability of products and packaging they buy. Glass containers are far easier to recycle than plastic.
PRC offers traveling bins to collect recyclable glass from different areas to provide ease and convenience, Shea said. The council offers a map to find these bins. Jones said a recycling bin exists within a “15- to 20-minute [driving] radius of every single person in Allegheny County.”
“The access is there,” Jones said “Now it basically comes down to, ‘let’s ensure that the public knows.’”
Hippert also refers people to resource lists that help consumers know what items are recyclable and how and where they can be recycled. PRC also works with partners like Owens-Illinois to create resource guides to combat misconceptions about what can be recycled.
Separating glass from your household recycling bins can be helpful to companies that sort it out of single stream recycling bins, Jones said. He explained that the more glass breaks down in your bins, the less likely it is to get recycled.
Hippert also added that companies need to do more to embrace sustainable recycling practices. He said many manufacturers around the country are asking for more recycled glass.
“ We’ve got higher sustainability goals for the amount of recycled content we want in our containers,” Hippert said. “There’s demand.”
