A Strategic Materials facility (Image: Strategic Materials)

Seattle Public Utilities is looking for new solutions and encouraging residents to continue collecting cleaned jars and bottles after a major customer for recycled glass has shut down in the city. SPU says there remains a “strong demand for recycled glass nationally.”

Ardagh Glass Packaging, “the major glass bottle manufacturer in the Seattle area,” announced it has laid off 245 employees and permanently shuttered its E Marginal Way facility citing “ongoing pressure from low-priced imports,” SPU says.

“This recently announced closure has created unprecedented challenges for glass recycling in Seattle and neighboring jurisdictions,” SPU said this week about the shutdown.

SPU says it will continue to collect glass as it looks for new partners and the city and the county have convened a “a Glass Recycling Roundtable” with “regional and national industry partners and municipalities that is meeting regularly to develop short- and long-term solutions for sustainable glass recycling.”

SPU says it is also working with Strategic Materials Inc., a nation glass processor with a facility that cleans and sorts glass into clean glass cullet from recycling programs in the region, including glass collected in Seattle, that has continued operations here despite the Ardagh shutdown. Considered North America’s largest glass recycler at the time, SMI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year in federal court in Texas claiming around $432 million in debt liabilities.

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“SMI is developing new customers and diversifying its end markets to meet changing demands. SMI is stockpiling clean glass as it secures new customers and is renting temporary storage space from SPU,” the city says.

The difficulties around glass come as the latest challenges for Seattle’s recycling programs as national and global markets for materials ebb and flow.

After recycled items are picked up, they are taken to a Material Recovery Facility where recyclables are sorted by workers and machines and sorted materials are baled together to be sold. Those bales are then shipped to recyclers to be made into new material — or stored until market conditions improve.

(Image: SPU)

In 2017, global markets underwent major corrections as China stopped accepting most foreign recyclables. SPU continues to recycle paper, metal, glass, and plastics after transitioning its sales to mostly North American vendors.

City contracted Material Recovery Facilities are prohibited, the city says, from disposing of recycled goods in landfills. A big part of the MRF industry can become storing the materials.

What comes next for Seattle glass is being shaped. SPU says it is working with Seattle’s Office of Economic Development as well as the Seattle Chamber of Commerce “and other regional and state Economic Development organizations to support further innovation and collaboration around glass alternative uses and end markets.”

You can help by continuing to recycle your bin-appropriate glass — and avoiding “aspirational recycling.”

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