Kansas City News Blog

When I spoke to Steve Russell for my story about Ripple Glass this week, he seemed to confirm my -- and many recyclers' -- fears about the fate of the bottles, cans and paper products we toss in our curbside bins each week.

Photo by Nicole Reinertson

Ripple Glass turns Boulevard Brewing's trash into Owens Cornings' treasure

​Russell is the St. Louis-area manager for Strategic Materials, one of the largest recycling companies in the country. For years, the facility in the Gateway City received a portion of Kansas City's glass recycling stream. But not everything that comes into the warehouse, Russell told me, leaves for reuse.

"We throw in the landfill 40 to 50 percent of it," Russell said of the often-contaminated loads of metal, glass and plastic. "It's just unusable."

Ripple Glass is changing the precarious and unknowable fate of Kansas City's recycled glass. Instead of being picked up by a waste hauler that hates the hassle and sent to a distant processing plant that may trash it, old beer bottles and pickle jars will never leave Kansas City. Instead of suspecting the worst, local residents who toss their empties in Ripple's collection bins know exactly where their glass is going: to an Owens Corning facility to be turned into insulation.

"A six pack will create enough insulation for an eight-foot wall cavity," says Gale Tedhams, the Ohio-based corporation's director of sustainability. "So, it really is up-cycling. The use of that glass will be even more valuable to the world. In the life of the building it could last 100 years or more. It's a great story."

One the By-Product Synergy Project is trying to replicate across the region.

When Boulevard Brewing Company was dreaming up ways to save its broken glass and used beer bottles from an eternity in the landfill, the Kansas City Regional By-Product Synergy Project was among the organizations that pitched in to the thought process. Yeah, the title is a mouthful. But the concept behind the program, run by Bridging the Gap, is pretty simple.

"We get companies, usually manufacturers, with other companies to see if there's something one is wasting that another can use," says Phelps Murdock, president of Bridging The Gap.

In this case, Boulevard Brewing had a waste product (glass) that Owens Corning needed as an input (to make fiberglass). With brewery-conceived Ripple Glass acting as the middle man, that trash-to-input exchange will start in earnest before the end of the year. But Murdock points to two other synergies that are already up-and-running in Kansas City.

The first model, Murdock says, is Missouri Organic, which rescues food from rotting in the landfill and turns it into compost. Americans toss out literally hundreds of billions of pounds of expired or half-eaten food every year and, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, only 3 percent gets recycled. Making a dent in Kansas City's rotten footprint, the crew from Missouri Organic picks up food waste from a handful of local businesses, including big names like Hallmark Cards and Sprint. Using a nifty, natural process at its 10-acre plot in Liberty, the family-run Missouri Organic turns wilted lettuce from the salad bar and battered produce from grocery store warehouses into rich compost that fertilizes gardens throughout the region.

Another company that savages trash from the landfill, Murdock says, is Lafarge. Two years ago, with a little help from Bridging the Gap, the cement maker started using non-recyclable paper, plastic, fabric and rubber scraps to power its Sugar Creek concrete plant. Earlier this year, Lafarge partnered with Waste Management, Inc. to slurp up some of the methane gas coming out of the nearby Courtney Ridge landfill and add that to its growing mix of alternative fuel. Thanks to that garbage bounty, Lafarge has reduced its use of coal by 30 percent.

Murdock hopes to see more of those types of relationships across the region. Right now, the BPS group has 12 businesses. That's only one more than when the initiative started in 2004. But Murdock says interest is growing fast and the group is finishing up a software program that will be better equipped to inventory by-products and match them with companies that need them.

"What we've focused on in the past few months is bringing in more manufacturing companies," he says. "Once we get 30 or 50 companies involved, we'll be able to find a lot of synergies."

Now that Ripple is on the scene, though, the group won't have to worry too much about glass.