I hope everyone is having a safe and enjoyable summer. Please play safe and remember to recycle when you’re out and about. Niceties aside, I would like to focus on glass. Glass is a highly used recyclable. It can be used over and over again. Why? It takes less energy to melt and mold recycled glass, rather than starting with raw materials, like silica.

Our Willamette store recycles an amazing 7,650 pounds of mixed glass per week. Multiply that by 52 weeks and that weight increases to a stupendous 397,800 pounds or 198,000 tons per year. And where does OUR recycled glass go? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Oregon Beverage Recycling Co-operative (OBRC) collects our glass twice weekly. It is transported to their facilities in Portland, where the glass is further crushed until it reaches a uniform size of about a half dollar.

This mix is then color sorted into brown, clear and green. All the glass collected from the Portland, Eugene, Medford and Pendleton areas then goes to the Owen Brockway plant in Portland. There, it is re-made into beer bottles.

And just in case you were wondering, all the glass collected from the Bend area is transported by rail to Gallo Glass in Modesto, California to be made into – you guessed it, wine bottles.

Just as the planet Earth can survive only by recycling its air and water (over and over and over for billions of years), so can humanity survive by following nature’s examples. With only a few hundred years under our modern construction and consumption belts, we need to educate by example. Remember to remember. You get the picture.