Essex County DPW implements glass pulverizer

LEWIS | The market for glass recycling fizzled flat with federal trade tariff regulation on Chinese recyclables sales years ago. And when a storage pile of glass bottles became unruly in Essex County, officials came up with a solution that removes glass entirely from the county's waste stream. Essex County Board of Supervisors Chairman Shaun Gillilland said that, while glass isn't considered a hazardous waste, if it's stored over six months, the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) considers the pile an unauthorized landfill. So they began to look for ways to recycle it here and keep it out of landfill shipments. Jim Dougan, superintendent of the county's Department of Public Works, and county engineers worked to find a sustainable system to make a product they could use. With $140,000 of federal American Rescue Plan Act money, the county Solid Waste Committee, chaired by Gillilland, sought approval to buy a glass pulverizer. The Board of Supervisors agreed. The pulverizer makes a kind of glass sand and gravel. The new equipment was recently set up just outside the county transfer station's sorting center. The machine has a giant hopper on one end that holds glass bottles and jars then feeds them on a conveyor belt into a tank where hammers turn and crush and tumble them into two sizes of glass sand, one fine and the other three-eighths, the size of small gravel. A sorting bin on the far end of the pulverizer spits out bits of paper from labels and any debris removed through a filter called a trommel screen. Dougan joined with Gillilland and County Manager Mike Mascarenas to show how the new equipment works. It's one of the few glass pulverizers in municipal use in this region. The sand is perfectly safe to handle, Dougan said, reaching his hand under the spray of sand and gravel. "Now we have the ability to turn these bottles into use in the county," Gillilland said. A crew of two manages the machine's operation from either end, one sorting any plastic that might have fallen into the hopper, the other using a shovel to even out piles of the finished glass sand and gravel. Neither operator said the machine is unbearably loud. They can pulverize the county's glass from food-grade bottles and jars over a few days a week. "DEC was here when we installed it," Dougan said of the county's recycling solution. "They've approved use of the pulverized material for roadbeds and for raised filters in municipal septic systems, which have to be rebuilt periodically and allowed to rest." "This creates a product from our recycling materials that is usable," Mascarenas said. "We won't have tons of glass sand," Dougan added. "The pulverizer makes a ton per hour. The county averages about 150 tons of recycled glass per year." As for application in road repair and reconstruction, the county repaves some 20 miles of county roadways each year, Dougan said. Of that, about five miles total are rebuilt, usually in sections. Making glass sand won't save the county tens of thousands of dollars, he said, but they are storing it beside the pile of overburden and soil mix from nearby mining that they will blend it into. "It's not a huge savings, but it is a real solution for what to do with the glass," the DPW super said. "Necessity became the mother of brilliant thoughts here," Gillilland said. "We'll produce it only for our roads at this point," Dougan said. "DEC said the three-eighths can also be used for French drains. They also said it could be mixed in with road sand, but we are going to wait on that for now and use this in building roads." In some other areas of the U.S., pulverized glass is being used to make "glassphalt," blending glass sand into asphalt, which makes roads less slippery and reduces surface cracking. Essex County no longer has to pay to ship glass with its compacted trash to the landfill.

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Essex County DPW implements glass pulverizer

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