AKRON, Ohio – The city’s service department announced last week that it would no longer accept glass in recycling bins, attributing the change to Waste Management Ohio, whose market for recycled glass had reportedly disappeared.

That came as news to Waste Management officials.

“We continue to accept and process glass in recyclables, and we have a market for recycled glass,” said Kathy Trent, senior public affairs manager for Waste Management Ohio.

Akron officials said the removal of glass from the list of appropriate recyclable trash came in response to information obtained from Waste Management’s public sector representative, Vince Crawford.

Trent said the decision and action was the city’s.

“To be clear, Vince did not request that Akron discontinue glass recycling and hasn’t made that request of other communities,” Trent said.

Recyclables collected from Summit County and Cuyahoga County all end up at the same Waste Management sorting operation, the Greenstar Recycling Facility in Akron. It’s the largest materials recovery facility in Ohio, receiving more than 10,000 tons of trash per month.

It was Akron’s Deputy Public Service Director, Chris Ludle, and Marcie Kress, executive director of ReWorks, which oversees recycling in Summit County, who relayed the perceived directive at an Akron City Council committee meeting Nov. 26. They said the glass ban was necessary because Waste Management could no longer find a buyer for recycled glass – a claim that Waste Management says was false.

Ludle confirmed on Thursday that no one at Waste Management asked the city to end glass recycling. He said that the glass ban was enacted for financial reasons.

“Waste Management provided information to the city explaining that glass is one of the materials they can accept and process, but at a cost the city shares,” Ludle said. “As we evaluated ways to keep our recycling program sustainable and improve the quality of our recycling stream, removing glass until the market improves was the most practical solution.”

Kress said ReWorks remains neutral on the glass ban decision. Her agency’s primary mission is to improve what residents place in their recycling bins, she said.

Kress said the glass ban is now under review. She cited the recycling website which states: “ReWorks is working with surrounding solid waste districts, municipalities, and the recycling industry to formulate a definitive answer on this material. Please be patient with us as we work toward this goal.”

The web site does not state whether residents will be ticketed if they continue to recycle glass during the review period. Kress referred questions about the glass ban to Akron officials.

Ludle said that, until the market for glass improves, the city is asking residents not to recycle glass.

Diane Bickett, executive director of the Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District, said she was unaware of the Akron ban before reading a story about it on Cleveland.com, and nothing has changed at her agency.

“Glass is still on our list of accepted curbside recycling items,” Bickett said. “None of the four recycling processors that provide curbside recycling services in Cuyahoga County, including Waste Management, have stopped accepting glass from the cities they serve in this county.”

Bickett added that the recycling processors’ contracts with cities in Cuyahoga County require them to accept glass, and the public supports glass recycling, “so they are working to make it work.”

Neither Waste Management nor Akron would address questions about the city’s contract with the company.

Problems with glass can arise in the recycling process because it tends to break easily, contaminating cardboard, paper, sorting machines and conveyor belts with small shards of broken glass, Waste Management’s Trent said. Workers at the recycling centers are required to wear gloves and safety equipment to protect themselves from the shards and other hazardous materials, she said.

“We are having ongoing conversations with all the communities we serve about reducing contamination in the recycling stream,” Trent said. “Unfortunately, there isn’t a single solution for reducing contamination.”

Akron City Councilman Rich Swirsky, who questioned the glass recycling ban at a meeting of council’s Green/Sustainability committee Nov. 26, said he was led to believe that the change was made in response to a request from Waste Management.

“I’ve been pushing them to take another look at it, seeing if there are other alternatives,” Swirsky said. “I wonder if there’s one hand not talking to the other.”

In an online video of the two-hour committee meeting, Ludle and Kress told the committee that Waste Management had requested the ban, and they mistakenly told the committee that the company had made the same requests of other municipalities.

“We are at the mercy of Waste Management,” Ludle told the committee. “It is not economic to maintain that system” of glass recycling, he said, referring to the mistaken belief that there was no after-market.

When asked if other municipalities in Ohio served by Waste Management have banned glass from recycling, Trent did not respond.

Over the past year, curbside recycling has become threatened by contamination, misplaced garbage in recycling bins, and restrictions on acceptable materials by China, the world's largest importer of waste.

Up to 25 percent of the materials that people place in recycling bins are contaminated or garbage, Bickett said. That drives up the cost by forcing recycling operations to separate the usable and unusable materials. China’s restrictions have caused the price of recycled materials to drop, she said.

Waste Management has been campaigning to clean up those problems, and Trent praised Akron for its diligence to keep recycling sustainable.

“We are encouraging cities, like Akron, to evaluate materials in their recycling programs,” Trent said. “Paper, metals and plastic bottles typically have the greatest environmental benefit at the least cost. Depending on local markets, other materials, like glass, can have higher costs associated with them.”

What should Akron residents do with their glass recyclables?

While the city reconsiders its decision to ban the recycling of glass, residents technically should not place glass in their recycling bins. Here are a few alternatives for the environmentally-conscious in the short term, to avoid throwing it into the garbage bin:

- Hang onto the glass to recycle should the ban be lifted.

- Ask a friend or family member living in a community that does recycle glass to put your recyclables in their bin.