After a long hiatus, glass is again being recycled in Powell. Sue Woods聽and three other community members 鈥� Denise Kelsay, Jayson Nicholson and Luke Robertson 鈥� banded together and launched a $120,000 fundraising campaign to buy a glass pulverizer for the recycling center last year. They wound up hitting their goal in about six months.
鈥淚 think that just testifies to the fact that they really want to recycle glass,鈥� Woods said. On Friday, the 鈥淐rush It鈥� group and Powell Valley Recycling will celebrate the newly installed machine with an open house at the center. Powell is joining a couple other recycling centers around the state in accepting glass, but unlike facilities in Jackson and Sheridan, the local facility will turn the material into a sellable product instead of paying to ship it elsewhere.
The new pulverizer turns glass items into sand and a kind of pea gravel that can be used in a variety of landscaping projects. Given the high cost of shipping out glass, the Crush It group concluded early on that 鈥渋f we were going to recycle it here locally, it had to be a finished product that we could also use locally,鈥� Nicholson explained.聽They also didn鈥檛 want to add costs for the center, Woods said, 鈥渟o this was perfect.鈥�