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       Pete Moe, CEO of The Exchange/Orcas Recycling Services, rummages through a pile of broken glass, looking for samples to test. If the test is successful, Big Blue’s cullet could be shipped to Bellingham and used in construction projects for sidewalks, curbs and gutters. （The Exchange）
       An innovative project on Orcas Island aimed at returning bulk glass waste from landfills to the productive economy has begun shipping waste glass to Bellingham Public Services, delighting green business advocates.
       “This is the Holy Grail for zero waste communities around the world,” said Pete Moe, chief executive of Orcas Recycling Services. The company currently accepts glass sorted at the point of delivery for free. “It means a lot to us to find a use for this material that is otherwise useless.”
       After China stopped accepting American trash in 2018, Moi and his board began rethinking glass recycling. Three years later, Orcas Recycling received an Andela GP-05L glass crusher, which can crush glass waste into sand-like aggregate—recycled cullet or waste glass that has potential for commercial or artistic use.
       Moy believes that if the island’s crushed sand and glass could be used commercially, the “heaviest component of waste” could be removed from the waste stream, saving Orcas Recycling thousands of dollars in transportation costs. “It could create a new local or regional industry,” he said.
       ”We have community support,” Moy said. “Overnight, we had a mountain of translucent broken glass. But we needed to create a new industry, and fast.”
       Orcas Recycling launched the #OrcasGlassChallenge campaign to stimulate the growing market for glass recycling. Most respondents suggested art projects or garden steps – solutions that, while effective, have limited utility.
       The outlook began to change when Troy Lautenbach of Lautenbach Recycling and the San Juan Transfer Station in Mount Vernon casually mentioned the Big Blue project to a project engineer in Bellingham.
       “Throughout my career, I’ve been asking myself, ‘What if?’” he said. “What if we could use glass briquettes in public infrastructure?”
       In 2011, as part of the Green Communities Project, the Bellingham Housing Authority began looking for sustainable alternatives to burying 400 outdated toilets.
       Freeman Anthony of Bellingham Public Works worked with the housing authority and others to break down toilets and successfully use them as a replacement for virgin aggregate in concrete.
       ”We call it ‘Poticrete,’” Anthony said. “It’s now an integral part of the Bellingham Demonstration Area, designed to Green Road certification standards for low-load ‘grading’ applications like sidewalks.”
       Last year, 13 years after the Poticrete innovation demonstration project began, Anthony learned from Lautenbach that Orcas had surplus cullet. “I knew Lautenbach’s ‘what if’ instinct, so I contacted Moe and asked for a sample. A few days later, Pete showed up in his truck with a 5-gallon bucket,” he said. “I immediately started testing it on concrete.”
       Replacing sand or gravel with aggregates in concrete reduces strength. However, when designing slabs, the ratio of aggregate to sand is not critical, and strength is not that important, Anthony explains.
       Anthony believes that “using cullet in low strength applications is better than mining clean sand,” allowing more expensive sand to be saved for higher structural needs.
       “I asked Pete Moe to do more,” he said. The concrete, with its crushed glass fill, meets both the code and new environmental standards. It’s inexpensive — especially if Bellingham can get its own crusher — and will reduce landfill emissions while creating quality sidewalks. “In other words, it’s a win-win.”
       Both Moy and Lautenbach were pleased that Anthony’s experiments showed the potential for turning “useless waste into useful goods.”
       “We already know that the city of Bellingham supports green solutions for public infrastructure,” Moy said, “but if the city starts shipping large volumes of cullet from Orcas, they may eventually decide it’s cheaper to own and operate their own Big Blue.”
       With more than 80 members, the Regional Glass Recycling Roundtable is a collaboration between Seattle and King County utilities and industry partners to find glass recycling solutions.
       Thanks in part to Lautenbach’s longtime connections in the commercial recycling community, roundtable participants learned of another glass crushing company now operating in Washington state: Ellensburg Glass Recycling Cooperative. [Editor's note: The manufacturer of the Ellensburg cooperative's crusher was incorrectly identified in a previous version of this article.]
       Last year, the agenda for a roundtable in January centered on the upcoming closure of the Ada Glass Packaging plant in Georgetown, which prompted the search for new solutions. Since the closure of the Ada Glass Packaging plant last fall, glass products have been piling up across the region.
       ”Recyclers are working hard to develop markets,” Lautenbach said. “If Pete Moe’s five-gallon bucket of broken glass can really be used on Bellingham sidewalks, as Freeman Anthony is about to prove, then tiny Orcas Island might be enough to change our corner of the world.”