Nashville launches glass recycling at Lower Broadway bars

Like tourists heading out on Lower Broadway for the night, the Metro Nashville government is going to grab some longnecks at honky tonks, and see how things unfold.

Mayor Megan Barry launched a glass recycling program Tuesday that will cover 20 bars on the famous stretch. Meanwhile, her administration is still figuring out what to do with all the additional bottles.

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Nashville bought two new trucks and hired six workers to collect all the spent Bud Lights, Miller Lights, and Michelob Ultras favored by bachelorette parties. The program is meant to reduce the amount of waste heading to landfills and clean up the busy alleys behind the bars, where bottles pile up and shatter. Officials would like to eventually reuse some of the glass locally.

“We want the visitor experience to be better, and we also don’t want all of this going into our landfill,” Barry said at Legends Corner, one of the first bars to participate in the “Honky Tonk Glass Recycling” program. Thirty-two varieties of beer line the top of the Legends bar, where patrons can also buy pink “boot coozies” for $5.

“If we’re going to be the greenest city in the Southeast, we have to do things like this,” Barry said.

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The program is pretty simple. Bartenders and bar-backs sort glass bottles from other trash. Some honky tonks have also set out blue bins for customers. The refuse workers will swing by twice daily to pick up large bins, and will dump in the bottles in a trash truck. Barry, donning protective glasses, pulled the lever on a white truck Tuesday and watched the glass burst: “Look at all those longnecks,” she said.

Nashville paid $416,000 for two new trucks, and $400,000 annually for six new refuse workers’ salaries.

For now, Metro has been shipping the broken bottles — along with other recycled glass collected at three drop off sites — to a processing center in Jackson, Tennessee. There, the shards are converted into material for sandblasting.

While some other materials have a market where the city can earn revenue, glass is costly to recycle. Metro pays $40 per ton, more than the $38.50 it pays for shipping general waste to a landfill. Glass’s heavy weight increases shipping costs and end-users aren’t willing to pay a premium because raw glass is relatively inexpensive.

To save on disposal costs, Metro officials hope to process and reuse the glass in Nashville — potentially as a substitute for gravel in public works projects. They’re ramping up the program from three bars to 20 this month, and would like to include other Downtown businesses.

Once they know how much glass they can collect regularly, Metro will determine how to reuse it, said Phillip Jones, assistant director of Metro Nashville Public Works.

“All the calculations say that we’re going to save money, do the right thing, and be able to use what was once waste — now as a raw material,” said Tiffany Wilmot, president of Wilmot, Inc., a consultant hired by Nashville to study the city’s waste processes.

The pilot has generated 10 tons of glass since it launched on January 3.

While the program may eventually save Nashville money, it has the potential to burnish the city’s — and Barry’s — environmental reputation. She has advocated for recycling, but for most residents nothing has changed significantly during her two years in office. Currently, glass isn’t accepted at curbside residential recycling pickup, which comes just once a month.

“In the long term we would like to do more recycling across our community,” Barry said. “I think what that all comes down to is, ‘what is the best the allocation of resources?’”

A 2015 proposal estimated a cost of $1 million annually to pick up recycling twice a month.

“I just think we all need to be aware of what we’re doing with our trash and how it affects the environment,” said Brenda Sanderson, co-owner of Legends and two other Broadway bars.

Tourists on Lower Broadway also welcomed the added recycling.

“I think it’s a must, and the bars doing this shows visitors that it’s important. It’s the most public part of Nashville,” said Jane Rehl, 71, from Savannah, GA.

Nashville is paying consultants $500,000 to develop a master plan to handle solid waste, including recycling, composting and reuse. A landfill in Rutherford County, where Metro currently takes its trash, is expected to reach capacity in coming years.

While Americans have been conditioned over recent decades to recycle, some economists say the environmental evidence doesn’t support the effort. Plastic (because of its space needs) and glass (because of its weight) require more transportation energy than other materials, which offsets some greenhouse gas savings.



