Glass recycling bins cut down on drive for St. James residents

Smithtown has opened glass recycling bins in a St. James shopping center in response to requests from hamlet residents, officials said.

The bins at Lakewood Plaza on Lake Avenue join four other locations in town. They are intended to minimize the drive for residents who no longer have the option of dropping glass curbside with other recyclables, and solid waste officials say the bins — color coded for brown, green and clear glass — allow for neater and faster collection than the 55-gallon drums the town once used. More bins could be on the way in Fort Salonga and on Smithtown Boulevard.

Glass recycling in Smithtown slowed from more than a thousand tons per year to 200 tons last year after the town, like others on Long Island, stopped curbside recycling pickup of the product. 

Always problematic — haulers complained that it contaminated more lucrative streams like aluminum and wreaked havoc on machinery — glass became prohibitively expensive to process at a time when the towns were reverting from single to dual-stream recycling. 

“The recycling markets are very tight to nonexistent,” Mike Engelmann, Smithtown’s solid waste coordinator, said in an interview. While some uses do show promise, such as using old glass for road aggregate, Long Island has no large-scale manufacturing facility, said Neal Sheehan, the town’s sanitation supervisor, and trucking old glass off the Island is economically unfeasible. “Say there were a place in southern New Jersey… Well, to get it here to there, you’re paying transportation, tolls, and you can only take so many yards before you’re overweight.”

Brandon Wright, a spokesman for the National Waste & Recycling Association, said that Smithtown’s strategy could produce a more marketable product. “With dropoff you get a much cleaner product that doesn’t generally require any sort of secondary processing,” as opposed to the food contamination that typically accompanies glass from curbside pickup, he said.

For now, Smithtown officials ship the town’s glass to Brookhaven, where it is used for drainage and landfill cover under a special agreement with New York State environmental officials. 

While Engelmann and Sheehan said they continue to seek markets for Smithtown glass, Engelmann said they also hope they will simply see less of it in the future. “People are changing their habits,” he said. “We’re seeing more products available in containers other than glass.” 

By Nicholas Spangler

nicholas.spangler@newsday.comspanglernewsday

Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.