Prism Glass Recycling stepped in to find a way to get the hundreds of skids of unused cobalt blue bottles from a warehouse near Corning, New York, to a facility that could crush the glass to be made into new containers by a manufacturer in McKean’s County’s Port Allegany. It wasn’t easy. Cobalt glass is more rarely used than clear glass and other colors of glass. The Ardagh Glass plant in Port Allegany, for instance, makes cobalt glass containers only every other year. And 500 skids are a lot of bottles to haul and crush for recycling.
But when Scott DeFife, president of the Glass Packaging Institute and the Glass Recycling Foundation, asked if Erie’s Prism Glass Recycling could help save the bottles from being discarded, it found a way. The bottles had been manufactured for Mxy Fusions Moscato, a company co-owned by rapper Nicki Minaj. For some reason, the bottles hadn’t been used and would have to be landfilled if they could not be repurposed. “They were taking up an incredible amount of warehouse space,” said Laura Guncheon, vice president of project management for Erie Management Group, which owns Prism Glass Recycling.
“We thought at first that we could get the bottles to Erie for de-casing here and then into our logistics chain through Prism,” Guncheon said. “But with over a million bottles, 500 skids of them, we did the math and realized that with the manpower and wherewithal we have, we couldn’t get it done in the amount of time we had. The end markets wanted the crushed glass by the end of summer.”