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The Scenic City, River City, Hill City, Gig City–Chattanooga has a lot of nicknames! Let’s try another one on for size: Glass City. It may not roll off the tongue easily, but it rings true. Or at least it did ring true. Chattanooga was once the glass capital of the South.
We’re home to the world’s first Coca Cola bottling company.
The Chattanooga Glass Company, once one of the largest glass packagers in the South, and founded by the original owner of the Chattanooga Brewing Company, at its peak employed upwards of 600 employees, producing more than 50,000,000 bottles and other glass products each year.
The Chattanooga Medicine Company (present day Chattem Chemicals) owed much of its 20th century growth to its Art Deco embossed glass bottles which can still be found all across the country.
Dozens of area dairies utilized glass bottles to deliver fresh milk to area businesses and residents for much of the 20th century. The iconic Mayfield Dairy started next door in Athens, TN.
Double Cola, still headquartered in Chattanooga, pioneered the first large size glass bottles of cola in 12 oz packaging, doubling the original 6 oz standard.
In the early days, deposit programs provided the incentive for a closed loop ecosystem of reuse and recycling in the early days of glass. But, by the middle of the 21st century, steel and aluminum started to emerge as preferred beverage packing materials. Plastic (PET) showed up in the late 70’s. And by the 80’s, glass’ number was up. Driven by competition from other packaging types, deposit programs all but vanished, and the economic model to sustain glass recycling was severely threatened.
Buoyed by Orange Grove’s efforts to grow area recycling starting in the late 80’s, residents could still recycle glass for the next several decades. However, recycled glass values continued to decline, and improvements in garbage trucks and the introduction of automated processing equipment made it more challenging to separate clean glass out of the recycling stream. The city of Chattanooga and other area municipalities made the difficult decision to eliminate glass recycling in their curbside collections program by 2018. In parallel, when our local recycling facility stopped accepting glass in mixed recycling, opportunities for the private sector—restaurants, bars, hotels, industries— to recycle glass through private waste haulers also disappeared.
Fast forward to today, and our metro area recycles less than 10% of its glass waste. The residential glass that is captured via municipally run recycling centers leads a tortured life—traveling from household to drop off centers in private cars; from drop off centers to our local recycling facility by truck; and then finally being transported by a truck which makes a 250 miles roundtrip journey to collect the material. When considering handling and transport, it costs our area municipalities more to recycle glass than dispose of it in a landfill. While well intentioned, it’s a highly inefficient process. The glass not captured in metro area drop off centers–more than 10,000 tons per year and comprising virtually all glass from restaurants in bars–ends up in our area landfills. Oh, and did we forget to mention: there is currently no glass recycling of any kind available for our North Georgia neighbors in Dade, Walker, and Catoosa Counties.
Learn more about how we’re developing an integrated glass collections and processing business to serve Chattanooga metro area’s glass recycling needs.
Reach out to us to learn how you (as a resident) or your business can play a part in conserving our local resources by recycling glass with Overlooked Materials.
My family and I moved to Chattanooga in early 2021 with 3 young daughters in tow. We were living in Germany at the time, and the weight of the pandemic was bearing down on us. As my wife and I contemplated this next step in life, it was important for us to find a community where we could see ourselves raising our family. With several career-driven moves over the preceding decade (Atlanta to Germany to New Hampshire to Atlanta to Germany again!), we both felt it was time to put down roots.
There was always something that drew my wife and I to Chattanooga. When we lived in Atlanta we would come up to visit for weekends, marveling at the scenery, the friendly people, and importantly the balance that seemed to come from being in a city that’s big enough to satisfy an active life, but not too big to feel overwhelming. When an opportunity to relocate here in early 2021 developed, we jumped at it and haven’t looked back since.
After a couple of years here, I started to ask myself how I could be an even larger contributor to our community fabric. I felt pulled towards a business focused on local sustainability. Through the course of months of research and conversations with community stakeholders, glass was a common thread. You see, our region captures only a small percentage of post-consumer glass (<<10%) within our existing recycling infrastructure. What we do capture is shipped out of state, often costing far more to recycle landfill.
But, our citizens and businesses want better solutions. Over 90% of the nearly 4,000 residents who responded to a 2018 Chattanooga Public Works glass recycling survey expressed a willingness to recycle glass in separate curbside containers. While not included in the survey, restaurants and other businesses have likewise sought more sustainable solutions for the glass they generate
With prior leadership experience in waste & recycling, as well as in materials processing, I felt convicted that I could help solve our challenges around glass.
Overlooked Materials was born.
I sincerely thank you for taking the time to visit Overlooked Materials. Starting this business has been a true labor of love. I look forward to connecting and partnering with you on this journey, and I invite you to join me in recycling your glass and using recycled glass materials.
Glass recycling is tricky, especially for mid-sized cities like Chattanooga.
Did you catch our note about that truck making a ~250 mile return journey to pickup our glass? This happens because there is no local processing of glass. To set up a processing facility that can clean and sort glass efficiently, you need A LOT glass. And, you need some local consumers of that glass cullet (fancy term in the glass industry for small pieces of glass). We’re big enough to generate thousands of tons of glass waste, but often not big enough to justify large glass processing facilities. We’re…Overlooked.
If this was an easy challenge to overcome we would already have a solution. But it’s not easy. That’s why we’re setting up a vertically integrated business to close the loop for glass recycling in our area
We’re focused on:
