Recycled glass piles up

Mountains of recyclable glasshave beenpiling up ever higher at centres inand around Montreal, ever sinceKlareco, aglass processing plant in Longueuilthat prepared about 70 per cent of the glass in Quebec for recycling shut down last spring.

Klareco processed more than 100,000 tonnes of glass in Quebec each year and sent most of it to the U.S., where it's used to make insulation.

Since the plant closed, at one glass-recycling depot alone, in Chateauguay, 8,000 tonnes or 8 million kilograms of glasshas piled up in the course of a single season.

The situation has environmentalists worried that by the time a solution to the problem is found, the broken shards of glass may have degraded to the point that they won't be recyclable any longer.

Karel Mnard of the Collective Front for the Ecological Handling of Waste says the way to fix this problem is for the province's liquor board, la Socit des alcools du Qubec (SAQ), to introduce a deposit system.

Mnard says most glass bottles that end up in people's recycling bins are from wine and spirits.

He says Quebec and Manitoba are the only provinces that don't offer that service.