When a bottle or jar gets tossed into a recycling bin in the Roanoke or New River valleys, it more than likely winds up in a huge pile of crushed glass behind Joe Benedetto’s warehouse. As the president of Recycling and Disposal Solutions, Benedetto tries to find a new life for what would otherwise be trash.
But glass, which historically has a low recycling rate in the United States, creates a bottleneck at RDS. Unable to find a buyer, and unwilling to haul it to the landfill, Benedetto let it accumulate at the Roanoke facility. The pile of cullet, or crushed glass, is estimated to weigh more than 1,800 tons.
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality cited RDS earlier this year for exceeding a storage limit of 150 tons for recyclable waste. In an agreement with DEQ, Benedetto accelerated his plans to grind the crushed glass into a finer, sand-like material and remove contaminants such as small pieces of bottle caps, paper and plastic waste.