HUNTSVILLE, AL -- For six years, the Lowe Mill arts center took great pride in lugging its empty glass bottles to Allied Waste's Huntsville Recyclery off Triana Boulevard.

Assistant Manager Grace Billiter didn't mind the smelly, heavy work because keeping the bottles out of the landfill was good for the planet. She assumed they were being turned into new, eco-friendly products.

But Allied officials confirmed last week that glass hauled to the recyclery by green-minded residents - about two tons every month - has not been recycled.

At least not in the traditional sense.

Instead, it is burned with other garbage in the city incinerator. The ash is then used as landfill cover.

"People have been going through tremendous effort to recycle their glass," Billiter said Thursday, "and it's all for naught because it's just ending up in the landfill. We could have thrown it into the trash just as easily."

"It would have been nice to know that years ago."

On April 22 - Earth Day - Billiter and several friends who discovered what was happening took their concerns to the Huntsville City Council. Council President Mark Russell has asked Doc Holladay, executive director of the city's Solid Waste Disposal Authority, to explain the glass recycling situation at Thursday's council meeting.

The authority pays Allied Waste $2.3 million a year to pick up, sort and find markets for glass, discarded newspapers and magazines, empty milk jugs and other items recycled by Madison County residents.

"The council, I believe, wants to get a glass recycling program in Huntsville," Russell said Wednesday. "We're going to use this as an opportunity to discuss that."

Allied on Thursday defended its practice of burning glass, saying the steam is used to heat and cool Redstone Arsenal buildings.

"It's a form of recycling," said Blaine Ellzey, an operation manager in the company's Huntsville office.

But Allied's general manager for this area, Bill Brinkley, said the company wants to get back to conventional glass recycling. Going forward, glass brought to the recyclery will be shipped to a Strategic Materials factory in suburban Atlanta and turned into recycled glass products, he said.

"It's the right thing to do," Brinkley told The Times.

Thomas Moss, who joined Billiter at the council meeting last month, said he is "bitterly frustrated" that no one bothered to inform the public when Allied started burning the glass.

Day after day, people drive to the recyclery on A Cleaner Way and deposit their empty bottles into separate bins for clear, green and brown glass.

"It's insulting that my personal effort and the effort of others has been disrespected," Moss said. "We should have a green, state-of-the-art recycling service in Huntsville.

"Instead, we have lip service."

Beginnings

In 1990, Huntsville became one of the first cities in Alabama to launch a household recycling program. Just toss your used glass in the handy plastic bin and place it by the curb.

Glass was removed from the curbside program in 1995, but Allied (previously known as BFI) gave the strong impression that bottles brought to its recyclery would still be recycled.

Many other cities also started and later quit recycling glass door-to-door. The inevitable broken bottles pose a hazard to recycling center workers who have to sort the glass by hand; the jagged shards can also contaminate other recyclables.

Today, Athens is the only North Alabama city still recycling glass at the curb.

Bill Wojciechowski, who manages the Athens-Limestone Recycling Center, said he ships about 40,000 pounds of used glass to Strategic Materials in College Park, Ga., about once every six weeks.

"We're in it because we love the environment and keeping items out of the landfill," Wojciechowski said Wednesday. "We've simply put the energy into creating a program for it."

Brinkley said Allied made efforts in the past to drive glass from Huntsville to Atlanta to be recycled. But it became impractical because of falling glass prices and rising transportation costs, he said, noting that the company is not contractually obligated to haul glass out of the area to be recycled.

At some point, Allied chose to burn the glass rather than truck it four hours to Georgia.

"I can't speak to when this happened or why," said Brinkley, who moved here from Jacksonville, Fla., two months ago. "But I guess a decision was made to use an alternative means of reuse."

Holladay, the Solid Waste Disposal Authority director, said someone should have placed a sign outside the recyclery explaining what was being done with the glass.

"In retrospect, that maybe should have happened," Holladay said Thursday. "I don't think anybody had any intentions of misleading people. The hope was always that the (glass) market would come back."

Rumors, phone calls

Billiter and others learned what was happening through a series of meetings with Allied, the solid waste authority and Covanta Energy, the company that operates the trash incinerator. Billiter said she'd heard rumors that glass taken to the recyclery ended up in the landfill.

"I just started making calls," she said.

University of Alabama in Huntsville junior James Lovell also helped unravel the glass mystery.

The information systems major said he hopes it spurs the Rocket City to beef up recycling efforts. Since March, about 500 people have signed Lovell's petition asking that glass, cardboard, junk mail and more plastics be added to the curbside program.

Allied currently accepts only #1 and #2 plastics, which are the easiest to reuse. Birmingham and Nashville, among others, recycle all types of plastic.

"We're just trying to bring our recycling program up to speed," Lovell said Thursday. "It's one of the most basic things we can do to have a sustainable city, before things like alternative energy and solar architecture.

"We just need to lower our garbage output."

The municipal landfill on Johnson Road is permitted to accept up to 725 tons of trash daily; about 600 tons more is burned in the incinerator.

The 50-55 tons being recycled here daily pales in comparison.

Some 94,000 households in Huntsville, Madison and parts of unincorporated Madison County have curbside recycling service, but Holladay estimates that only 1 in 3 are regular recyclers.

"We've got to promote the program better," he said. "We're looking at every aspect of the program, questioning if it is all it can be."

Holladay said he is exploring whether Madison County's used glass could be made into "glassphalt" - a material sometimes used in road paving.

Birmingham's recycled glass is pulverized for use in concrete. Lafarge, the world's largest producer of building materials, buys about 60 tons each month from the Alabama Environmental Council's Birmingham recycling center.

Even so, Michael Churchman, the environmental council's director, said Alabama lags well behind most of the country when it comes to recycling. Only about 8 percent of the state's waste stream is reused, he said, while the U.S. average is about 35 percent.

"There's clearly some opportunities," Churchman said last week.

Billiter said she is encouraged by Allied's promise to recycle glass through Strategic Materials but wants to see "some kind of public record" documenting the shipments to Atlanta.

Like UAH student Lovell, Billiter said her ultimate goal is a broader, more aggressive curbside recycling program in Huntsville. She said the city would do well to copy Phoenix, which gives residents 96-gallon containers large enough for all of their recyclables, including glass and cardboard.

"We believe more people will recycle if they trust the system," Billiter said, "and are able to recycle more items.

"If we come together on this issue, we can make great strides quickly."