Glass returning to single-stream recycling gets tentative approval from Summit County commissioners

For the first time since 2014, waste haulers in Summit County may soon be able to accept glass in single-stream recycling. County staff recommended, during a Feb. 17 meeting, that the Summit Board of County Commissioners implement the change.

Single-stream recycling, which allows residents to put multiple types of recyclable materials in the same bin, started in Summit County in 2011. At the time, it included glass, but according to Bill Schenk, the assistant director of the Summit County Resource Allocation Park, the glass was shattering during collection and contaminating and devaluing the other recyclable materials.

The county’s material recovery facility did not have the capacity to process recyclable materials, so it would instead bale the materials into cubes and send them to a processing facility on the Front Range. The baling would compress materials, including glass shards, together.

“Those small glass shards were sticking to the paper and the containers of the single-stream, and that was devaluing that material,” Schenk said.

In 2014, after conversations with waste haulers, the county stopped allowing glass in single-stream recycling. Instead, it now has 12 locations where people can drop off mixed glass for recycling and four locations where people can separate their clear and colored glass to recycle it.

Schenk said the partner the county worked with on the Front Range to recycle glass, the Rocky Mountain Bottle Plant, had issues that led to it not being able to take Summit County’s glass. A new glass company, Glass to Glass Denver LLC, took over, but unlike Rocky Mountain Bottle Plant, the new company does not need glass to be separated by color, so Schenk said there is no need to separate glass colors at the county’s drop off sites anymore.

The county’s resource allocation park built a new material recovery facility in 2024 that allows the county to ship its recyclable materials to other processing plants without baling it, Schenk said.

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“We’re collecting it in a loose format,” Schenk said. “Therefore, the glass is not causing as much trouble as it was when we were bailing it all and shipping it down that way.”

Allowing glass in single-stream recycling would mean residents could put it in their recycling bins that they put on the curb for waste haulers to collect. Business owners, he said, would be able to have glass recycling picked up without having to pay for a glass-only route, and the change would help with space constraints in dumpster enclosures.

“This will be less confusing for our visitors that come from our other communities that have glass in their single-stream guidelines already,” Schenk said. 

The change would also help with county sustainability goals, like increasing the rate of diversion of waste from the landfill and extending the life of the landfill, Schenk said, pointing out that making it easy to recycle glass will increase glass recycling participation.

Schenk said staff had discussed the possible change with local waste haulers, Waste Management, which processes the county’s single-stream recycling, towns and other stakeholders, and they were all supportive of the change.

Commissioner Tamara Pogue expressed concern that the change would increase prices for residents. She had mentioned during an earlier discussion about High Country Conservation Center’s recycling efforts that the Pay As You Throw program has led to complaints from residents about trash hauling price increases.

Jen Schenk, the executive director of the High Country Conservation Center, said she spoke with representatives from Summit County’s towns who expressed some concerns about updating signage. She said the county would need to give towns and haulers some time to get signage updated.

“Everyone is overwhelmingly in support, but those are the costs that I’m aware of — is signage,” Jen Schenk said, “changing every sign in Summit County.”

Bill and Jen Schenk answered several other commissioner questions, including ones about how glass may affect the contamination rate of the county’s single-stream recycling, what the recycled glass is used for and if haulers have any issues with the weight glass would add to single-stream recycling. The answers raised no concern for the commissioners.

All three commissioners expressed approval of the change, though they stipulated that if county or High Country Conservation Center staff find out the change would bring additional costs to consumers, they should bring the issue back in front of the board to discuss.