CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A Pennsylvania transplant, living in the Charleston area, was disappointed when she found no recycling program when she moved to Kanawha County two years ago, so she created one on her own.
“We’ve saved 7,029 pieces of glass from the landfill since we had our soft opening in November and December,” said Christy Brown, President and CEO of Glass Smash Sand.
Brown and her husband run the operation out of their home as a part time job. The couple offers to pick up discarded glass from anyone in Kanawha County interested. The material is then processed into a sand product.
“There are two different machines. One is a crusher that has a raw product, but then it goes into a separate machine that filters out into different grades of sand. The sand can be coarse to almost a bunker/sand trap kind of sand,” Brown explained in an appearance on 580-Live on MetroNews flagship station WCHS Radio in Charleston.
The city of Charleston has a voluntary recycling program, but there is no program outside the city limits where Brown lives. She offers to pickup glass more as a service to keep it out of the landfill than as a job opportunity. It’s a small operation so she’s limited in what she can accept, but hopes it could eventually develop into a full fledged recycling program run by the city, county, or a private entity.
“I offer once a month, twice a month, or every other month pickup. So it just depends on your consumption,” she said.
Her work is championed by Charleston City Council member Emmett Pepper.
“I hear people all the time clamoring for this. People tell me, ‘I save my glass and take it to Ohio when I go to visit so and so.’ Another person told me they take their glass to Connecticut. They feel it’s important for them that their glass is being properly reused and not filling up the landfill,” said Pepper.
Charleston in recent months has issued a limited number of recycling bins. The materials are collected and shipped to a sorting facility in Raleigh County to be separated for recycling. Pepper said work is ongoing to hopefully locate a sorting facility in the Charleston area to handle the work in the near future.