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.