Letter: There are more effective ways to keep glass out of landfills

There is a very simple way to solve a large part of the food and beverage glass container problem: many states still have a refund bounty on those containers.

The containers are returned to stores that sell the recyclable product containers for a refund. Those states see far fewer containers discarded than states that do not have the “bounty.”

I think that it is a more practical way to increase this type of recycling than setting up municipal collection containers because everyone goes to the store at least once a week and it is not “out of the way.”

Another thought to increase the amount of glass used in containers is to tax the plastic containers at a cost high enough to encourage the use of glass in place of plastic; probably not very palatable because it would increase the cost of the product to the consumer, and also glass is fragile and thus more difficult to handle which would increase waste.

Having built and operated large waste to energy facilities in Hartford, Conn., Honolulu and Detroit, our solution to single-stream recycling was to segregate iron and steel with magnets after using a flail mill to crush all of the waste.

Because the temperatures in the furnaces were not hot enough to melt metals or glass, they comprised most of the ash after the waste was burned. Much of the glass was reduced to sand-sized particles and, because of the heat in the furnace, there were not many sharp edges in the remaining pieces.

The sheer amount of waste in the U.S. requires us to stop ignoring the problem and figure out ways to reduce the waste by following the European model as well as to adopt policies, including taxes and recycle refunds.

I do not think that there is a single answer, but plastics have become so cheap that they are becoming one of the highest volume materials in our waste stream and much of that waste is finding its way into our oceans.

John Hall

Wexford