Girls with Glass works to recycle for the Coastal Bend

The JC Elliot Service Station takes trash including recyclable materials like glass. While the glass often sits untouched at the landfill. It’s important to one Corpus Christi person that it continues to recycle.

“A lot of the trash that we go through in the Coastal Bend in glass and that gets dumped into our Bay along with the other trash people dump in the Bay,” Aryeh Lebowitz said.

Lebowitz is a 20-year-old in Corpus Christi with a passion for environmental justice.

“Just seeing all the negative environmental impacts on the Coastal Bend, it made me want to offset it just a little bit,” Lebowitz said.

That idea is what initially launched Aryeh’ glass recycling business, Girls with Glass which officially started last week.

Aryeh already has residential customers and businesses signed up.

“What they do is they’ll fill this up throughout the month with their glass waste and then once a month I'll come by their house and give them a new clean bag to use for the next month,” Lebowitz said.

Girls with Glass is also available to those in Portland and Aransas Pass. A membership costs $10 a month.

“The Coastal Bend doesn’t really have access to these types of resources,” Lebowitz said.

The Director of Solid Waste Services for the City of Corpus Christi, David Lehfeltt tells KRIS 6 that recycling glass can be complicated.

“Mixing it with the curbside recycling is problematic to begin with. If you get it to the recycling facility it messes with the equipment and it’s hard to separate out,” Lehfeltt said.

To avoid this problem, the JC Elliot Transfer Station has bins where people can drop off glass.

“We take what they bring us, haul it to the landfill and dump it in a big pile,” Lehfeltt said.

Lehfeltt says that the city plans to get a glass crusher, someday, to turn glass into sand.