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If you wanted to recycle glass in Chattanooga, you had to take it to a recycling center—
that is, until now. Kick your glass straight to your curb and let Overlooked Materials do the rest.
by eliminating the need to drive to the recycling center and sort your glass by color
by having your recycling picked up on route instead of driving it to a drop-off center
Plus, get exclusive access to limited production materials and products
like the opportunity to bring your glass in, watch it be recycled, and take home sand and gravel made from your own glass!
Talk to your kids about the impact of the glass recycling and take them to see the facility in action
Glass is fundamentally a 100% recyclable material. However, glass has a lower recovery value compared with other recyclables like aluminum, tin, and cardboard. The collection & processing of glass introduces all sorts of safety and maintenance challenges into single stream recycling processes. As a result, glass is not collected curbside in the much of the US.
Here in the Chattanooga region, more than 90% of post-consumer glass is not recycled. That’s more than 10,000 tons per year in our area which ends up in area landfills. The volume of glass that residents do recycle is processed in a way which is economically and environmentally unsustainable. Trucks make ~250 mile roundtrip journeys to pick up the glass, and it currently costs the City of Chattanooga and other area municipalities more to recycle than it would to send the glass to a landfill.
Couple of things to unpack here!
The drop off recycling centers are usually restricted to residents only. This means that businesses—restaurants, hotels, offices, etc.—cannot use the drop off points. More than half of all glass waste comes from non-residential entities, and almost all of this “commercial” glass ends up in a landfill.
For residents, when you recycle with us you’ll not only save your time, but by eliminating the collective thousands of inefficient miles driven to drop off recyclables, we expect to conservatively reduce the carbon footprint of your recycling efforts by >75%. (Contact us if you want to talk our math!)
Not at all! The equipment we use leverages a patented process to mill and tumble glass. The resulting products are certainly rough (think coarse sand and gravel), but the sharp edges are gone. In effect, we do through milling what takes mother nature years to create through sea glass.
Contact us to learn more. We’ll strive to answer your questions as transparently as possible.
