McAllen partners with cities to recycle

McALLEN — The city has recently teamed up with Pharr, San Juan and Weslaco to begin recycling glass and re-using the pulverized sand material for bedding in local road construction and other public works projects.

McAllen installed a new, roughly $95,000 glass pulverizer in August and has been collecting glass bottles and jars at its drop-off center since January in preparation for the pulverizer’s arrival.

The city officially began collections in early October and hopes to ramp up its operation in December as soon as Pharr, San Juan and Weslaco are provided with collection containers at their own drop-off centers. Those cities will divert their glass to the McAllen drop-off point.

“(The glass collection container) has gotten very popular. We’ve collected 40 tons without telling anybody we were really collecting,” said Ouina Rutledge, renewable resources manager for the McAllen Public Works Department.

The city received a $59,000 grant from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for the pulverizer. The City Commission put up the remaining $36,000 needed to purchase it.

Carlos Sanchez, McAllen’s public works director, said the city projects it will recycle at least 6,000 tons of glass annually, which would save it about $101,000 in landfill tipping fees.

The pulverizer will break down the glass into sand, which the city will use for bedding in road construction and storm sewer and water line installations, Sanchez said. The city is also looking to sell some of the sand to Innovative Block of South Texas, a La Feria company that produces and sells concrete blocks.

Rutledge and Sanchez are hoping that by recycling glass, the city can boost the percentage of waste materials that are diverted from the landfill and recycled. Rutledge said the city has improved that rate from 12 percent three years ago to 20 percent this year.

For now, the city is only accepting glass bottles and jars — not windshields, mirrors, light bulbs, pottery or ceramics.

Sanchez and Rutledge hope glass recycling becomes as popular as the city’s “Save the Greens” program — a partnership launched in 2007 that includes H.E.B., Wal-Mart and, most recently, the McAllen school district.

The city provides a receptacle to the grocery stores and schools and transports organic waste like fruits, vegetables and waste milk to be composted at the city’s facility and then used as a natural fertilizer. To date, the city has collected about 2,200 tons of green waste that would have gone to landfills and emitted methane gas, a major cause of global warming, Rutledge said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognized the program last year, and it has been replicated in cities across Texas, she said.

Rutledge’s goal is to match Austin’s recycling rate of 28 percent. She said the addition of glass to the city’s recycling repertoire should help — the pulverizer can handle up to 25 tons of glass a day.

“Glass is very heavy, so we’re looking forward for (our recycling percentage rate) to go up,” she said. “We encourage people to recycle their glass bottles and jars, and our hopes are to expand this over time.”

Nick Pipitone covers McAllen and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4446.