MY GLASS RUNNETH OVER
                    (C)1993 Alan M. Schwartz

Environmentalists, those fish kissers and tree huggers whose 
mystic internal demons surface and demand our cash, would have us 
believe that the solution to pollution is recycling.  The worst 
recycled paper can go into cardboard, for instance.  Cardboard 
makers were raked over the coals by the EPA for their solvent 
emissions from the glue that holds the corrugated inner layer 
onto the smooth outer ones, so they went to hot melt adhesives at 
great retro-fit expense.  The wax in hot melt adhesives persists 
through recycling to give the next generation of recycled 
cardboard greasy stains, making it valueless.  Consider glass.

Common glass is usually low-melting soft soda lime glass, and 
occasionally high-melting hard borosilicate - Pyrex.  They are 
incompatible.  Soft glass is usually colorless, green or amber.  
Even assuming the Pyrex contamination is negligible, even 
assuming that color separation can be usefully effected, who will 
buy the well crushed to finely powdered product of soft glass 
recycling called cullet?  In a word, nobody.

Glass manufacturers and their raw material suppliers hit hard 
times when PET soft-drink bottles displaced glass ones.  PET has 
even plowed major inroads into liquor bottles.  Window glass has 
stringent physical and color specifications which cannot be met 
by cullet.  Manufacturing overcapacity and material supply gluts 
make recycled cullet (with its collection, redemption, sorting, 
cleaning, processing and transportation costs) more expensive by 
far than virgin material.  Third World countries might be 
interested if the stuff were cheaper than the sand, soda and lime 
they currently use.  Sand, soda and lime are among the cheapest 
substances on the planet.  They are so valueless that they are 
never transported great distances except under extreme duress.  
The cost of fuel exceeds the value of the cargo.

British Columbia, Canada is a favorite haunt of Environmentalists 
short on donations and ecological horror stories because it is 
covered with the last old growth temperate rain forest in North 
America.  It is rich with spotted owls, giant bright yellow 
banana slugs, and other antediluvian horrors.  Dig another 
landfill in BC?  No way!  BC is thus faced with the problem of 
materials like glass which are essentially indestructible.  
Citizens are allowed one grocery bag of garbage plus their 
recycle bin per week.  Municipal incineration is banned because 
of air quality laws.

Even a nation populated by pleasant but slightly retarded 
Socialist tree slaughterers and herring chokers can be pushed to 
the wall.  Vancouver residents adhere to the "one bag/week" rule.  
Everything flammable goes into their private fireplaces where 
inefficient combustion mocks air quality legislation.  The city 
fathers are sitting on a tremendous mound of crushed glass.  What 
to do, what to do...

Millions of dollars of Crown-sponsored research has unequivocally 
demonstrated that coarse cullet may be substituted for aggregate 
filler in asphalt.  (At perhaps $10/ton, consider how much 
crushed rock a million dollars would purchase - Time is up!  
100,000 tons, or about 30,000 cubic yards.)  Research is 
constantly ongoing to harness the most sophisticated of modern 
technological porkbarrelling techniques to extend cullet-based 
asphalt research into the 21st Century while forever avoiding any 
real world application.

In the here-and-now Vancouver City Fathers had the poor judgment 
to not personally own the burgeoning numbers of warehouses solely 
devoted to storing Environmentalist-consecrated trash.  As the 
treasury was bled into anemia (no problem, just raise taxes) and 
the locals were inspired by exploding taxes to form lynch mobs 
(problem), government was roused from its official torpor into 
action.  Winter is the key ingredient.

What the City Fathers do is they collect discarded glass; pay 
redemption, sorting, storage, processing and more storage bills; 
and when the roads get frosty in winter they dump finely ground 
cullet on the ice like the much less expensive sand from which it 
was born.  Spring thaw then "initiates a natural, stochastic 
reintroduction of dispersed amorphous silicate particulates into 
the biosphere at large."  In plain English, they grind up the 
glass and spread it around.  Isn't that so much better than 
throwing it away like so much garbage that pollutes our lives?

The process by which garbage is transformed into public debt is 
called "recycling."  Fear not!  Even more sophisticated 
techniques for cullet utilization are aborning.