Efforts underway to add glass recycling options in Central Washington

Efforts are underway in Central Washington to provide something that's not readily available: places to drop off glass recycling.

Chris Lueck of Walla Walla has been a champion of local glass recycling since 2019, when he founded Ground2Ground, which collected wine bottles to grind into sand, which can be used in paving and landscaping in place of natural sand. Lueck said 4.5 tons of wine bottles might be thrown out in a week in the tourist season in the Walla Walla area.

He’s since rebranded the group as BIG Recyclers, switching efforts away from grinding the glass because he found a disinterested market. Instead, the organization, in partnership with the Glass Packing Institute, the trade association for the glass container industry, collects the glass bottles to sell and ship to glass manufacturers west of the Cascades in a hub and spoke model.

“We’re not doing anything new that other states and countries already aren’t successful doing,” Lueck said.

Glass can be recycled infinitely, without a reduction in quality, in a closed-loop system with no byproducts or toxic waste, unlike most other materials.

For Lueck’s plan to be sustainable, he said he needs to grow it to a larger scale. Right now, the glass is hauled by truck, which negates any carbon offsets. To reduce costs and carbon footprint, he wants to use the railroad, but he doesn’t have enough material to ship that way. That’s why he’s looking to surrounding cities to partner with, as he’s done in Walla Walla and Benton City.

Lueck spelled it all out in a talk given to the Yakima Downtown Rotary Club on Thursday.

“Imagine how much glass we could recover here in Yakima and Zillah,” he said.

In the Walla Walla area, he has partnered with 50 wineries and four restaurants. His career was spent in the food and beverage industry, including as a wine buyer for a grocery chain.

A large challenge for the industry is contamination, which prevents glass from being reused. To be accepted, the glass must be clean and free of labels. That’s why BIG Recyclers always has a volunteer during drop off hours making sure contaminates aren’t thrown in with the rest of the glass.

Lueck also wants to get schools and children involved, to feed the spirit of recycling to the next generation.

“We need to start changing our mindset of ‘buy it, use it, dispose of it,’” he said.

Yakima group

Yakima County residents don't have anywhere to recycle glass right now — with one exception.

Mick Nelson Janke was one of the attendees of Lueck’s Rotary speech. She calls herself the “doyenne of trash” and has known Lueck for about a year and half. In 2021, she started Yakima Recycles Glass, a small volunteer group that collects residents’ glass to transport to the Ellensburg Glass Recycling Cooperative, which raised funds for a glass crushing machine after glass was taken off the recycling list in Ellensburg in 2019.

On the first run, Janke picked up 200 pounds of glass.

“I was the only one doing the pickups, I have this little Prius — it was a lot of work for a 70-year-old woman.”

Now, she organizes what she calls a DIDO, or “drive in, drop off” system which in March collected 1,200 pounds. She does not publicly give out the address for the drop off until she can educate participants.

Like Lueck, Janke has had issues with contamination. She said she’s found beer bottles with limes still in them. The group recommends soaking glass overnight and rinsing with boiling water to get labels off — leftover glue residue is fine.

Janke moved with her husband to Yakima seven years ago from Oregon.

“The reason we picked Yakima is because we felt it had a real sense of community, and we wanted to get involved,” she said. “We hit the ground running in various causes.”

She’s hoping to bring in Lueck for a talk for her own group, and to keep the conversation going.

“There’s just so many plusses to glass recycling,” she said. “So much ends up in the landfill, but it’s endlessly recyclable.”