New London Drives Over Recycled Glass

If you drive through New London, you just might be driving over glass but you wouldn’t know it.

Richard Lee, New London’s road agent, oversees maintenance of all the roads in his town.

Standing on County Road he says his department built more than half a mile of this road with recycled glass last summer.

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“We used about 150 tons of glass mixed in with the gravel on this stretch of road and that was all we had at the time so we used every bit of it here. So far any place we’ve used it’s held up really well.”

Every road needs a porous roadbed.
Usually, it’s gravel.

Here, it’s 18 inches of carefully crushed and cleaned mayonnaise jars and beer bottles.

It’s well buried under three inches of blacktop.

The glass is crushed in an odd contraption – a metal box about the size of a doghouse.

On one end there’s a metal chute to take in the raw glass.

On the side is a set of screens to make sure that what comes out are glass chunks no larger than ¾ of an inch.

Lee says about ten years ago he and a fellow worker came up with the invention.
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“If we hooked this behind a truck, put a hammer mill run it by a motor and run a screener off of the hydraulics of the truck the thing oughta work pretty good, so we built it and it has so far, it’s worked really great.”

Lee says the crusher eliminates the need for complicated sorting because it can handle almost any type of glass.

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“We put everything through it, regular bottles, light bulbs, headlights; we put Pyrex dishes through it. We don’t try a toilet, that’s a little heavy-duty.”

Using glass for roadwork is appealing for two reasons.

First, for every ton of glass crushed, the town doesn’t have to pay $89 at the incinerator.

New London saved over $13,000 in incinerator costs last year.

And second, the town doesn’t have to pay for as much gravel.

At more than $5 per ton of gravel the town saved over $800 just on that half mile stretch of County Road. Town Administrator Jessie Levine.

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“To put the glass back to work in the roads has tremendous benefit for the finances of the towns, ultimately the cost for the town and state to maintain the highways in the towns and state.”

Many towns ship glass out of their communities for recycling.

But Todd Ellis, assistant director for Northeast Resource Recovery Association, says that isn’t paying off.

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“Handling all this glass and the time that it takes to keep it separated it’s too expensive and with the markets drying up, the revenue they were getting back was minimal at best.”

The Northeast Resource Recovery Association and another recycling organization, New Hampshire the Beautiful, want to make using glass in road construction an easier option.

Four towns, including New London, serve as regional crushing centers.

Nearby towns can bring their glass to the centers to be crushed for $10 a ton.

The host town can then use the crushed material.

Hanover is currently looking into recycling possibilities and recently paved a sidewalk with the glass.

The operations manager, Mike Chase says the material worked great.

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“We certainly would use it, because you’re looking for it as a cost savings and its also a very good product.”

The Department of Transportation tested the durability of crushed glass in travel and weather.

Fred Prior, from the geotechnical section of DOT, says that glass can be used as 10 percent of the material in any project in the state.

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“What we found was that glass when it was processed and used within the materials was better than anticipated and we saw nothing detrimental to its use within the base materials.”

With help from the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, the department found that glass actually holds up better to frost than gravel.

But Prior says glass is not without problems.

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“The mayo jars have to be washed out and food removed from the glass really very much as if you were going to use the jar again yourself.”

He also says using glass isn’t economically feasible for large statewide projects, but it’s well suited for local communities.

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“The one drawback for a state project is that a huge glass stockpile when incorporated into a highway project is really a very small amount of material.”

The pilot program began this spring and runs through this fall.

If the road agents have their way, more people will be driving on asphalt covered glass.

Local engineers hope drivers won’t notice anything except perhaps a lower tax bill.