Last October, Shepherd University Facilities Management Director Jim King received a $17,305 Recycling Assistance Grant from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection Rehabilitation Environmental Action Plan. The grant covered the cost of starting a new initiative at Shepherd University — a glass recycling program. It provided just enough money for King to buy the two machines necessary to start the program, a GLSand compact glass bottle crusher and sifter.
“The glass crusher was $7,000 and the sifter was $10,000,” King said. “The grant has been going on for environmental protection, recycling and sustainability for many years. I applied for it once before, at my previous job in Charleston, which is how I came up with the idea.”
King had hoped to get the program started while Shepherd University was in session last spring, but the school’s COVID-19 closure happened right when he was ready to begin it. “Almost to the day when I got it up and running, school had shut down,” King said, referring to the glass crusher.
According to King, the GLSand compact glass bottle crusher is used throughout New Zealand — individual restaurants have crushers on-site, to recycle the beer and wine bottles they empty. The sand is then dumped onto their beaches. “(The glass crusher) was invented by a person in New Zealand, because the beaches in New Zealand were eroding,” King said. “Like everyone else, the people there were drinking beer and wine out of bottles, and the inventor thought that it would be the perfect way to meet that need.”