CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Coastal Bend residents will have to wait a bit longer to recycle glass items because the new transfer station will not include a glass crusher until several years in the future.
It was June of last year when 3NEWS reported that the city had begun accepting glass at the J. C. Elliott Transfer Station. At the time, the city had plans to construct a new complex with a bottle crushing facility. That complex is still in works, but a bottle crushing facility may still be years down the line.
The director of solid waste services, David Lehfeltt, said although recycling efforts are ongoing in the city, glass is treated differently.
"We accept glass from customers that bring it to us," Lehfeltt said. "We can not recycle it at this time. We put it in a big pile and until we have a use for it, find someone that can actually recycle it, or we get our glass crusher in place, it's just going to sit there."
He said they can buy a crusher at this moment but they don't have a place to store it and the city doesn't want to waste taxpayers' money.
"So we want to be very prudent, we want to buy the equipment until we're actual ready to proceed and that's probably several years down the road," Lehfeltt said.
Aryeh Lebowitz is the new owner of Girls with Glass which is a local business that tries to raise awareness of recycling, especially glass in the Coastal Bend.
"Glass recycling is such a void in our city services that they just don't seem to care about it," Lebowitz said. Yeah, it's disheartening."
City councilmember Jim Klein said recycling in general is important, but the costs impact which items the city is able to recycle.
"The recycle program is not perfect an there is some inefficiencies in it as well," Klein said. "And it really depends on what economic market there are for those recycle items. Whether it's cardboard, paper, plastic or in this case glass as well."
Lebowitz hopes the city will consider prioritizing recycling efforts in the future.
"We are going to knowingly make a damage in our environment like that then we need to at least put money into upsetting that damage," Lebowitz said.
Lehfeltt said solid waste's long-term plan for glass recycling is to install a glass crusher that will reduce glass bottles to a sand-like product that will be used in city construction activities. However, it will still be several years before this can be a reality.