The mounting problem with glass

It’s Saturday afternoon in Vogel Street, the hosts are entertaining teams from Papamoa and Tokoroa, and there is a growing collection of black bags in a room behind the bar.

Cambridge Football Club is a hive of social activity – there are about 50 players and supporters in the building and the bottle opener is in constant use at a bar where there is no tap beer.

Peter Martens thinks it’s time to come up with better ideas for disposing bottles.

That amounts to good revenue – but it also presenting a headache. The black bags contain dozens of used green glass bottles. And there is no simple solution for disposing of them

Club president Peter Martens laments the fact the  five or six “at least” black bags full of glass bottles end up in a skip outside the clubrooms and are taken way to a landfill each weekend.

He thinks a better solution would be for Waipā District Council, which has invested in recycling in recent years, to provide a large skip exclusively for glass which could be collected on a monthly basis.

“And it make me wonder – if we are sending all our bottles to landfill, what about other sports club in Waipa?” he said.

Glass bottles which are recycled can get a variety of second lives- many are used in making new bottles, others are crushed and reused as a sand substitute for roading and construction, in concrete paving stones and pavements, to make sand for water blasting and as a filter in swimming pools.

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