Starting April 1, the city will collect items such as magazines and cereal boxes from the curbside because it's cheaper.
By JENNIFER FARRELL
Published March 6, 2004
CLEARWATER - As garbage goes, junk mail is more valuable than beer bottles.
Not only is glass expensive to haul, it breaks easily. And those clear, brown and green varieties you separated in the kitchen could shatter and mix on their way to the factory. For most manufacturers, it's cheaper to buy sand and start from scratch.
Paper, meanwhile, is in far higher demand. It fetches a better price, and it saves trees.
Taking such market realities into consideration, Clearwater is abandoning curbside glass recycling in favor of a program to collect mixed paper.
Starting April 1, residents can recycle a whole new list of paper products besides junk mail, including office paper, magazines, catalogs, paperback books, cereal boxes, shoe boxes and wrapping paper. Even phone books.
Bob Brumback, director of Clearwater's Solid Waste/General Services department, said the decision to start trashing the city's glass boiled down to the bottom line.
"You can't break even hauling it to the factory," he said. "We hung on as long as we could, but it's just gotten to the point that it's just not feasible."
Glass makes up about 5 percent of the city's waste, compared with 34 percent for mixed paper.
The plan is to cash in on the market's bigger appetite for paper and save space in landfills.
The city has a commitment from a buyer who will remake it into products such as the thick backs on writing tablets, said Tom Downes, Clearwater's assistant director of Solid Waste/General Services.
"They want all the mixed paper we can provide," he said.
Pinellas County stopped recycling glass in 2001 for virtually the same reasons, said Deb Bush, solid waste program supervisor for the county utilities department.
Almost no one wants to buy recycled glass, said Jennifer Caldwell, the county's recycling coordinator.
"We don't want to be collecting something," she said, "that we can't actually get recycled."
March 31 is the last day for curbside glass recycling in Clearwater. After that, city officials ask that residents place mixed paper, preferably in paper grocery bags, inside their yellow bins for pickup.
The city will continue to recycle aluminum cans, tin cans, newspapers and plastic bottles with the numbers 1 or 2 in the recycling symbol on the base.
For information, contact the city's solid waste department at 562-4920.
