I, trash
The short life and brutal death of a bottle of clear glass.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Sometime in the late 1990s
Inspired by a true story.
The first thing I can remember, I was standing on the edge of a shelf at the Giant Eagle in Bethel Park.
I was a handsome 10-ounce glass bottle, full to my plastic cap with rich Heinz 57 Sauce, which I hear is perfect for steaks, chicken and burgers.
Next thing I know some nursing teacher named Donna Abriola is grabbing me around my neck and jamming me into a shopping cart. An hour later I'm at her house on Old Meadow Drive in Upper St. Clair.
Donna and her husband Jack treat me with all the dignity and respect clear glass deserves — until my sauce is almost gone. When they started turning me upside down and banging my bottom, I knew the end was near.
All glass — clear, brown, green and even blue — has to go to the Great Recycler Down By the River some time. It's the way of recycling. I had seen my cousin the Heinz vinegar bottle go. Now it was my turn.
Donna carefully rinses me out and places me in the official white Upper St. Clair Township recycling coffin with a few soda cans, an ammonia bottle and a plastic detergent container.
On Wednesday night she sets us all out at curbside where the South Hills Waste Disposal recycling truck will pass by the next morning and start us on our final journey.
We recyclables spend a restless and scary night. No one needs to tell us what the process is like. Glass or plastic — we know it's going to be rough.
During the next week we're going to be smashed, squashed and hauled around Western Pennsylvania together in dirty trucks.
We'll be dumped and re-dumped on the hard ground in huge ugly piles. Then we'll be sorted by humans and crushed into Rice Krispies-sized granules. We'll become atomized commodities, priced by the ton.
What can I expect? I'm just trash — a throw-away society's piece of worthless refuse.
But it could have been much worse, I thought, as dawn broke and the raccoons went back to their beds.
I could have died in the City of Pittsburgh, where the recycling system is so messed up they've been taking bags of plastic and glass and burying them alive at a landfill. What a way for any recyclable to go — eternity under a mountain of garbage.
As noon nears, I hear the South Hills Disposal Company's recycling truck coming closer and closer. Suddenly I'm pulled into the air and tossed into a dark compartment and taken for a rough 9-mile ride to South Park Township.
No! No! Not the M.C. Arnoni landfill! We're recyclables, not garbage! Our driver, Kevin Marren of Baldwin Borough, doesn't hear our cries, but it's OK. It's a false alarm.
We aren't going to be turned into landfill layer cake at Arnoni's. But we are dumped rather rudely in a heap on a concrete pad, adding our well-rinsed selves to the trashy, malodorous effluent picked up that day in lesser communities.
I don't smash into pieces during my fall, thanks to all the soft No. 2 plastic Giant Eagle milk jugs and No. 1 PET Food Club seltzer bottles beneath me.
But within hours I am captured by a high-lift's big scoop and dumped into a big open-topped trailer. A tarp is pulled over the top and off we go again on the open road — 90 cubic yards of trash headed for Donora.
Donora? Mon River birthplace of Musial and the Griffeys. But where we end up after 20 miles of trucking is Metalife Resources, a processing center down by the riverside where dozens of colorful 30-foot mountains of assorted recyclable stuff like us wait to be sorted and reshipped.
For the second time in one day we are dumped on cold hard concrete. For four days there's a lot of equipment noise, but nothing happens to me.
Then our mountain of trash is attacked by a small front-loader. We are gobbled up and fed to a conveyor belt that carries us up to a bridge-like thing where human sorters with dozens of hands each stab at us and throw us into bins below them:
Aluminum cans in that one. No. 2 plastic Heinz ketchup bottles over there. PET soda bottles there. Brown beer glass...
Ahhhhhh!!
Some guy with hands quicker than Bill Mazeroski's picks me off the line and flips me into the clear-glass dumpster. Miraculously, I'm still in one piece when I land, but half of my fellow bottles are broken.
My body's condition doesn't matter to the owner of Metalife, an entrepreneurial young man named Gabe Hudock who has to think and act like a commodities broker. He gets 2 cents a pound for clear glass, no matter how many pieces I'm in.
Marketing used glass and plastic is a tough business with small margins and volatile prices. No. 2 plastic — my cousin the Heinz ketchup bottle — is worth 7 cents a pound today but could be worth 3 cents tomorrow.
OK, so I may not be worth as much on today's market as No. 2 plastic. But I cost Metalife a lot less to handle. I just get tossed into a huge dumpster.
No. 2 plastic has to be packed into bales before being sent east to a company that will shred it, grind it and clean it before turning it into a new picnic table. No wonder Hudock is always talking about what a great recycling system we've got.
As soon as my dumpster's filled to its 19-ton capacity, it's hauled some 20 miles away to the — gulp — crushing facility, which is in the parking lot of Carry All Products Inc. behind the K mart in Mount Pleasant.
Few bottles like me get to a pile at Carry All Products in one recognizable piece.
My little mountain of glass is mostly millions of chunks and shards of clear glass. But there's also a lot of garbage that isn't part of the recipe for making new glass out of old — lids, plastic rings, Pepsi cans, Starkist tuna cans and the ever- common plastic bottles.
But what do I care? My hours are numbered. The glass-smashing machine — a small but deadly hopper with steel gears and hammers and plates inside — is 30 feet away, constantly crunching, turning glass into 5/8th-inch pieces that a human can grab and squeeze by the handful without getting a scratch.
Before the conveyor belt drops glass into the top of the cruncher, a guy named Larry picks out the metal cans, lids and other contaminants like ceramic plates. Other conveyors, screens, magnets and a powerful vacuum prevent most of the wrong stuff from ending up where it shouldn't.
The final product, which pours into a small dump truck at the end of the noisy, clanky process, is not 100 percent raw glass. But it's pure enough for the Glenshaw Glass Company, which gets about 50 tons of clear glass a week from Carry All Products.
I can't remember how long I waited for my fatal rendezvous with Carry All Product's deadly killer. I may have passed out once or twice from the powerful beer smell that came from a hillock of green Rolling Rock bottles nearby.
The bottles — many still filled with beer — are pulled from the brewery's bottling line whenever a bottle shatters.
To make sure no one gets glass in a beer they buy, nearly 500 bottles upstream and downstream from every broken bottle are taken off the line by the company and sent to Carry All Products to be pulverized and recycled.
But what do I care? I'm about to die.
I'm clanking past Larry the Sorter right now.
In the next few seconds I'll be obliterated into a hundred pieces — what they call "cullets" in the glass recycling business.
My last thoughts are of sizzling steaks and chops and a lovely Memorial Day barbecue in Donna's back yard.…
Not long afterward, my humble and harmless remains were taken by a Carry All Products truck to Glenshaw Glass in Gibsonia. There, within 24 hours, they were melted down and mixed 50/50 with raw materials to make new glass for the 1 million bottles that are born there every day.
By the time you read this, I — a former 10-ounce clear glass bottle of Heinz 57 steak sauce from Upper St. Clair — will most likely be a shiny Nantucket Iced Tea bottle on my way by truck to Boston.
****
The really sad ending of this tale is that when it first appeared on a Sunday in the Post-Gazette the type was completely garbled — paragraphs and columns were jumbled and mixed up. Very of the PG’s readers read the repaired version of the ‘Death of a Bottle,’ which might be why it was never turned into a Pixar movie. -- BS