Mason City's recycled glass, plastic has been going to dump

MASON CITY, Iowa (AP) — For more than three months, all of the glass and plastic in Mason City’s curbside recycling bins hasn’t been recycled at all.

Instead, the city has been forced to dump glass and plastic recyclables at the Landfill of North Iowa because the Mason City Recycling Center no longer accepts glass or plastic.

“We’ve kept picking it up in hopes that we would be able to find an outlet for it,” City Administrator Aaron Burnett told the Mason City Globe Gazette. “Unfortunately, we do not have an outlet at this time. What we’ve been doing is talking to the landfill here about options we have there to potentially take materials like this and build a transfer station so we’re able to move them someplace else.”

Heather Eilering, office manager at MCRC, said the reason it stopped accepting glass and plastic was simple.

“We couldn’t even give it away,” she said of glass and plastic. “We also have no place to store it.”

Mason City Sanitation Supervisor Scott Brattrub said the change has not had a major affect on day-to-day operations, calling it “not too bad.”

“Unfortunately, we are still dumping the plastic and glass at the landfill,” he said. “We take the cardboard out to the recycling center and then drive the truck out to the landfill and dump the rest of the commodities.”

According to environmental organization Sierra Club, glass presents tough recycling problems — including lack of end markets, contamination, and transportation costs — partly because it weighs about 10 times as much as a similar volume of plastic or aluminum.

It also breaks up easily, which...