Early this summer Decatur will deliver red bins to residents for recycling glass. Assistant City Manager David Junger said he isn’t sure when the bins will arrive but it will be sometime before July.
The city began requiring residents to separate their glass last July, but they had to provide their own separate container, preferably less than 18 gallons. The problem, Junger said, is that collectors are finding glass in all sorts of containers including dilapidated homemade bins like cardboard boxes.
In recent years an increasing number of processors won’t accept co-mingled recycling with glass. Glass winds up getting sent to landfills with the city getting charged more for the co-mingled product.
Decatur contracts with Latham Home Sanitation for residential recycling services. Latham delivers the city’s non-glass recyclables to a Milledgeville processor and the glass goes to Strategic Materials in East Point.
According to its web site Strategic Materials is “the largest glass recycler in the United States.” The company processes between 250 to 300 tons of mixed glass and garbage daily from across the southeast.
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