With glass now out of the bin, here’s what you can still recycle in Prince William County

PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY — Residents should not toss glass into their recycling bins as trash haulers in Prince William County will no longer accept it for single-stream recycling.

County solid waste division chief Tom Smith told leaders it’s costing the county more than it used to recycle the product, as it must be shipped to processing facilities in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, as one doesn’t exist in Virginia.

And much of the glass that goes to be recycled ends up coming back to the landfill, anyway, because it’s too dirty to be recycled.

“It gets a little depressing to see the amount of waste you generate,” Smith told the Prince William County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, March 19.

County officials blame China, which for years took shipments of materials to be recycled. In 2013, the county began placing limits on the types of materials it would take and ratcheted up those restrictions last year.

With costs increasing from $70 to $90 a ton, Smith says it’s now cheaper for trash haulers to pay the waste disposal fees at landfills that it is to pay to have glass hauled way for recycling.

“I’ve done this for a long time, and this is the first time I’ve seen recycling cost outpace the cost of disposal,” he told Supervisors.

The glass may break easily in the recycling process, which also makes it problematic in the single-stream recycling process that includes plastics, paper, and cardboard.

While trash haulers in the county will no longer collect it, Smith says he hopes to accept glass at two collection sites, where residents will be able to deposit it:

• Prince William County Landfill at 14811 Dumfries Road
• Prince William County compost facility at 13000 Balls Ford Road

Afterward, the glass will be hauled to Fairfax County where it will be ground up to make an aggregate material for use in construction, said Smith.

“Fairfax just bought a crusher,” he said.

County trash haulers will continue to accept clean cardboard, paper, plastic bottles and jugs, aluminum and steel cans.

Plastic bags, electronics, batteries, and clothes are all banned from the single-stream recycling process.

“We have a lot of ‘aspirational’ recycling where people think it can be recycled, and then they put it in the bin… stuff like diapers, needles, plastic bags, cell phones… and that has increased the cost of recycling,” said Smith.

Prince William County adopted a recycling program in 1992, and the state mandates that it recycle at least 25 percent of its waste.  The recycling rate in Prince William sits at about 34 percent, below the state average of about 43 percent.

The county had a contractor operating a recycling center at its landfill until 2011, when the contractor — a newsprint manufacturer — went out of business due to the declined in newspaper circulation, according to county documents.

Today, private industry handles the job, which amounts to a $1.9 billion business in Virginia, said Smith.