Mark your calendar: Olympia will stop collecting glass at the curb Jan. 1

Glass and plastic coated cartons will no longer be accepted in Olympia’s curbside recycling bins come Jan. 1.

The changes are linked to China’s crackdown on imported recyclables, which decreased the value of materials and made recycling more expensive.

“That’s resulted in a huge oversupply of materials, and now recyclers are getting pickier about what they take,” said Ron Jones, senior planner at the city’s public works department.

Both changes comes at the request of Pioneer Recycling Services, which sorts recyclables collected in Olympia and other Thurston County cities.

This only affects city of Olympia customers. LeMay’s curbside recycling in Thurston County will continue to accept glass in separate bins.

Unlike LeMay, Olympia collects glass mixed in with other recyclables. That makes it more likely to break and harder to separate out. Glass makes up nearly a quarter of the recyclables the city collects.

Instead, the city plans to collect glass bottles and jars at three locations starting Jan. 1: at Yauger Park on Alta Street Southwest on the west side, at the city’s drop-off recycling center on 10th Avenue Southeast, and at Concrete Recyclers on Black Lake Boulevard Southwest in Tumwater.

Glass will then be taken to Concrete Recyclers to be crushed and used for road and construction material.

Glass already is accepted at the county’s Waste and Recovery Center in Hawks Prairie.

As for coated cartons — think milk and juice cartons, juice boxes and frozen food boxes — the coating makes it difficult to break down the paper inside. The city says those items should now be thrown into the garbage.

Olympia does curbside garbage collection at 15,000 homes and 8,500 multifamily households. Officials plan to spend the coming months getting the word out about the changes, Jones said.

Drivers will monitor collections to see if people are catching on.

When city officials recommended the glass collection change back in September, they expected to save $90,000 to $170,000 a year by collecting glass at drop-off sites, depending on how much they take in.

But that doesn’t mean customers will be paying less, at least not right away. The City Council this week approved utility rates for 2020, including slight increases for residential and commercial garbage and recycling.

This story was originally published December 20, 2019 at 6:00 AM.