Bellingham Taps Orcas Island Glass Sand
by Toby Cooper (Originally published on the Salish Current.)
Orcas Island’s trailblazing project to divert heavy, discarded glass away from destination landfills and back to the productive economy has begun sending glass byproduct to Bellingham public works, delighting green business advocates.
“It’s the Holy Grail of ‘zero waste’ communities everywhere,” said Pete Moe, executive director of Orcas Recycling Services, which now accepts source-separated glass free of charge. “To take a valueless material and find a use for it — that’s huge for us.”
Moe and his board of directors began reimagining glass recycling after China stopped accepting shipments of America’s trash in 2018. Three years later, Orcas Recycling took delivery of an Andela GP-05L Glass Crusher, a machine capable of pulverizing trash glass into sand-like cullet — recycled broken or waste glass with potential for commercial or artistic applications.
In a naming contest for the powerful device, Orcas schoolkids chose “Big Blue.”
If commercial uses can be found for the island’s sand-crushed glass, Moe reasoned, the “largest component of trash by weight” could be removed from the waste stream, saving Orcas Recycling thousands in shipping costs. “Potentially,” he said, “a new local or regional industry could be created.”
Glass crushing on Orcas became an immediate success.
“We had buy-in from the community,” said Moe. “Overnight, we were growing a small mountain of translucent glass cullet. But we needed to create a new industry, pronto.”
Orcas Recycling launched #OrcasGlassChallenge to jumpstart the nascent market for cullet. Most respondents offered art projects or garden steppingstones — helpful solutions but strictly low-volume applications.
When Troy Lautenbach of Lautenbach Recycling in Mount Vernon and the San Juan Transfer Station happened to mention the Big Blue project to a Bellingham project engineer, the outlook began to change.
“I have been asking ‘what if’ questions all my professional life,” he said. “What if we could use glass cullet in public infrastructure?”
That’s when Lautenbach remembered “Poticrete.”
Converting trash to treasure
In 2011, the Bellingham Housing Authority began seeking a sustainable alternative to landfilling 400 outdated toilets as part of the Green Communities Project.
In collaboration with the housing authority and others, Freeman Anthony of Bellingham Public Works pulverized the toilets and successfully substituted the result as an alternative to virgin aggregate in concrete.
“We called it ‘Poticrete’,” said Anthony. “It is now one component of Bellingham’s demonstration site to meet Green Road Certification Standards for low-stress ‘flatwork’ applications like sidewalks.”
Poticrete is commemorated with a plaque at Ohio and Ellis streets across from the food bank.
Last year, 13 years after the innovative Poticrete demonstration project, Anthony learned from Lautenbach that Orcas had a surplus of cullet. “I knew of Lautenbach’s ‘what if’ instincts, so I contacted Moe for a sample. In a couple of days, Pete arrived with a five-gallon bucket in his truck,” he said. “I went right to work testing its application in concrete.”
Reducing waste while saving money
Substituting filler materials for sand or gravel aggregates in concrete reduces strength. But in flatwork applications, Anthony explained, the filler-to-sand ratio is not critical, and strength is less of a concern.
Anthony believes that “using cullet for low-strength situations is better than mining virgin sand,” reserving more costly sand for higher structural needs.
“I am asking Pete Moe for more,” he said. The concrete with cullet filler meets code while also satisfying newer green standards. It will be cheap — particularly if Bellingham gets its own crusher — and will divert from landfills while making good sidewalks. “In other words, everybody wins.”
Both Moe and Lautenbach are delighted that Anthony’s tests show promise of converting a “valueless waste product into a useful commodity.”
“We already know the City of Bellingham likes green solutions for public infrastructure,” Moe said, “but if the city begins to ship cullet from Orcas in quantity, they may ultimately decide it is cheaper to own and operate a ‘Big Blue’ of their own.”
Big Blue on the doorstep of change
The 80-plus-member Regional Glass Recycling Roundtable is a collaboration between Seattle and King County’s public utilities and industry partners dedicated to finding glass recycling solutions.
Thanks in part to Lautenbach’s perpetual networking in the commercial recycling community, the Roundtable has taken note of another glass crusher currently operating in Washington: Ellensburg Glass Recycling Cooperative. [Ed.: The Ellensburg co-op’s crusher manufacturer was misidentified in a previous version of this article.]
Last year, the Roundtable’s January agenda was dominated by the looming closure of Ardagh Glass Packaging in Georgetown, triggering the search for new solutions. When Ardagh shuttered last fall, glass immediately began accumulating throughout the region.
“Recyclers are always trying to develop end markets,” said Lautenbach. “If Pete Moe’s five-gallon bucket of cullet proves viable for Bellingham’s sidewalks, as Freeman Anthony seems poised to demonstrate, tiny Orcas Island will have changed a piece of our world.”