After a long hiatus, glass is again being recycled in Powell.

It was over a decade ago that the Powell Valley Recycling Center stopped accepting glass, but “people have still been grumbling about it,” said Sue Woods.

“I’ve heard about it ever since I moved here,” Woods said, “and I said to myself, ‘Well, I’m going to fix that problem.’”

She and three other community members — Denise Kelsay, Jayson Nicholson and Luke Robertson — 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.

“I think that just testifies to the fact that they really want to recycle glass,” Woods said.

On Friday, the “Crush It” 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 “if we were going to recycle it here locally, it had to be a finished product that we could also use locally,” Nicholson explained. 

They also didn’t want to add costs for the center, Woods said, “so this was perfect.”

Dozens of donors

Preparing for the campaign took research — including seeking advice from glass recyclers in Orcas Island, Washington, in Michigan and other parts of the country.

Once the local group had hammered out a plan, they sought and received the formal blessing of the Powell Valley Recycling Board. The campaign kicked off in the spring of 2024.

Unlike other recycling operations in Wyoming, which are run by municipalities, Powell Valley Recycling is an independent nonprofit. That proved key to the campaign’s success, Woods said, “because people are happy to donate money, but they don’t want to donate it to the City of Powell.”

The Crush It group used a variety of methods to reach potential donors, ranging from grants applications to social media to making in-person pitches to recyclers stopping by the center.

A substantial chunk of the funding came from a quartet of large contributions: St. John’s Episcopal Church and The Moyer Community Foundation each provided $25,000, and the City of Powell and Steve and Meg Nickles each chipped in $10,000.

But they were among roughly 180 donations — from a $20 bill Woods found on a downtown sidewalk to checks mailed in from Powell, Cody and other parts of the Big Horn Basin.

Donations came to Kelsay’s address, “so it was great going to the mailbox every day and having these envelopes showing up,” she said, adding, “Powell’s a real supportive, giving community.”

Many donated in honor of the late Ann Hinckley, who was instrumental in starting Powell Valley Recycling in the early 1990s. Hinckley passed away just before the campaign got started, and Kelsay said they dedicated the effort to her.

‘The premier recycling center’

After getting past the halfway mark, the Crush It group was able to order the pulverizer from Andela Products. The New York-based company spent more than six months building the machine to the Powell center’s specifications and delivered it in late April.

The unit is formally known as a GP-MegaMini Glass Pulverizer, but the group affectionately dubbed it “Sandy the Crusher,” with Powell artist Scott Larsen creating an anthropomorphized image of the crusher munching on a glass bottle. That served as the campaign logo, and a vinyl version will be affixed to the machine — alongside a medallion memorializing Hinckley.

“We’ve tried to really have fun with this instead of being [just] a glass crusher,” Woods said.

The glass dumped into the pulverizer becomes a mixture of sand and pea gravel-sized material known as cullet. (Labels and other waste are diverted to a separate pile.)

Since glass is formed from sand, “you end up, basically, with what it started out as,” Kelsay said, which makes it a unique recyclable.

Woods said she’s already heard from many people who are interested in using the material. The challenge is that it takes a lot of glass: In pulverized form, glass takes up about one-eighth of the space, Nicholson said, which means it takes a dump truck’s worth of bottles to yield a truckload of finished product.

Woods and Kelsay — who have since joined Powell Valley Recycling’s board — hope to get more glass by approaching businesses in Powell and recyclers in neighboring communities like Cody; they’ve also been brainstorming about the potential of some kind of pickup service.

“We would like to be like the premier recycling center,” Woods said. “We want to be real innovative. We want to see what else we can recycle.”

For now, though, they’ll celebrate the new glass crusher. Friday’s open house at the center — located at 946 Road 10 — begins at 4:30 p.m., with a demonstration of the pulverizer at 5:15 p.m.

Glass joins a list of accepted materials that also includes white paper, newspaper, cardboard (not pasteboard), No. 1-7 plastics, tin and aluminum cans, plastic bags, scrap metal, ink cartridges, medicine bottles, electronics (without lithium batteries), bubble wrap and packing peanuts, among other items.