It has been almost a year since Flagler Beach’s garbage trucks stopped picking up all recycling materials except for some carboard and aluminum. Glass, plastics, newspapers and metals were out. It just wasn’t worth it for the city, the cost of recycling having skyrocketed since China stopped absorbing millions of tons of recyclables several years ago. Four months later, the commission had a change of heart. First, it raised garbage rates 1.17 percent, with another 2 percent rate increase expected next year. Then it added a $2-a-month recycling fee to customers’ bills. Then it agreed to buy a $200,000 glass-crushing machine that will enable residents and businesses again to add glass to their recycling bins starting May 4.
Sanitation Director Rob Smith had proposed buying the machine. City Manager William Whitson backed the proposal and pushed it through the commission. The glass-crushing machine, nicknamed “Big Blue” by the city, will transform residents’ recycled glass into useable products, according to a city release. The machine pulverizes the recycled glass and creates both glass sand and glass gravel. The products can then be used to fill sandbags, make decorative landscape mulch, apply to drainage needs and other uses.
When the city stopped recycling glass, it didn’t men it stopped collecting it in its garbage trucks. It merely meant that the glass had to be dumped along with other ordinary garbage. Garbage tipping fees at the dump are set by weight. Glass adds considerable weight to the total volume, and therefore tipping fee costs. Last summer during a budget workshop, when commissioners agreed to buy the $200,000, one of the rationales was that by again recycling glass and potentially diverting large amounts of it from the dump, it would lower the city’s total garbage weight and thus lower its tipping fees.