Goodwill of Greater Washington is now pulverizing glass items donated to its D.C.-area stores that don’t sell on the retail floor, and it expects to recycle a lot of them.
The glass pulverization program, which debuted this month, comes after a $1 million grant from the Truist Charitable Fund, which is shared with Goodwill of Delaware and Delaware County, and Goodwill of Chesapeake in Baltimore. All three have their own pulverizing machines.
Goodwill of Greater Washington has nicknamed its pulverizer “Penny.”
“We anticipate pulverizing 500,000 pounds of glass in a year, and what that can be made into is both sand and gravel,” said Catherine Meloy, president and CEO of Goodwill of Greater Washington.
Some of the sand and gravel will be sold to construction companies and landscapers. Some of the landscape-grade gravel will be bagged and sold at Goodwill stores.
Only 33% of glass is recycled in the U.S., according to the Glass Manufacturing Industry Council, despite being 100% recyclable. An estimated 28 billion glass items find their way to landfills each year.
Goodwill of Greater Washington said its new glass pulverizing program will also create new training and employment opportunities.
Glass pulverizing is the latest effort by Goodwill of Greater Washington to recycle and repurpose landfill-likely materials.
Much of the donations that arrive in Goodwill trucks comes in plastic garbage bags. Goodwill has an existing contract with Winchester, Virginia-based Trex, which makes composite outdoor decking materials for residential and commercial use manufactured with recycled materials.
“For Goodwill of Greater Washington alone, we’ve collected about 50,000 pounds of bags in a year,” Meloy said. “That a equates into about 5 million bags.”
It has another partnership to recycle all the boxes donations come to stores in.
“We bail those, and we send it to Georgetown Paper Stock. They recycle that and make new paper stock out of the cardboard that we send them,” she said.
Another partnership is with computer maker Dell, which recycles donated old computer equipment, mostly harvesting metal parts for recycling. Goodwill of Greater Washington said the Dell recycling partnership amounts to about 300,000 pounds of old computer gear a year.
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