Turning Old Beer Bottles Into Garden Mulch

Is there anything high-speed flexible impactors can't flail into gold? Not bloody likely, given the magic they're performing with garbage glass in Tennessee.

While you and your friends might sell beer bottles to acquire more beer, or use them to build wicked steampunk goggles, the Cumberland County Recycling Center is grinding them up to make cheap mulch and road salt. Wait: That's actually possible? Hell yeah, it is, and here's how it works.

Last year, the county, which is home to towns like Crab Orchard and Pleasant Hill, had to close its landfill. But rather than pay about $420,000 a month to haul its loads to another county, it purchased a ferocious, $93,793 glass grinder from the New York company Andela. (This saga is all recounted in Public Works Magazine, a must-read for fans of unusual municipal machines.) So now the recycling center just tosses its used bottles into the pulverizer's sucking maw, transforming weapons of bar brawlers into harmless dust and gravel.

This is where it gets interesting. According to PW's Victoria Sicaras:

Selling a county's trash back to its residents: smart idea. Cumberland claims that the madly swinging hammers inside its Andela pulverizer has helped bump up its recycling revenue's from $240,000 to more than $400,000. That's a profit lump not to be scoffed at in these lean times.

Austin runs a similar glass-crushing operation, giving away free scoops of glittering glass for use as decorative mulch or drainage material. The aggregate's edges are rounded enough that you can walk on it without draining out like a punctured IV bag, and a slight percentage of paper and bottle caps lends the material an interesting visual quality. With a lifespan of 1,000-plus years, the glass won't decompose like regular mulch, and it has a grittiness that naturally repels slugs. (Or maybe it's the beer residue.)