Written by Bob Jørgensen | 15 September 2009

You've heard of the Trail of Tears, the Yellow Brick Road to Oz, The Primrose Path and the Road to Hell, which is paved with good intentions.
Well, Harpswell boasts one short road that is partially paved with mayonnaise jars.
The road that will eventually connect the town recycling center with its communications center tower is, well, different. It contains a layer of crushed kitchen glassware, mayonnaise and jelly jars, ketchup bottles and miscellaneous glass containers that one held everything from spaghetti sauce, instant coffee, mustard pickles along with real necessities like Martini olives and marashino cherries. This layer of crushed glass is standing in for the usual ¾" of crushed stone used to help provide drainage, and in this case, it also saves tax dollars.
According to Fred Cantu, manager of the recycling center, behind the Town Office Building, the decision was made to find an environmentally responsible way to dispose of a large quantity of crushed glass that would also eliminate the need to buy crushed stone or gravel for the new roadbed. According to the latest price from R.A. Webber & Sons, crushed stone for this purposely sells for $20 per cubic yard. By substituting glass from the recycling bin the town has saved over $2,400.
In this case the glass, which is ground up on site, was laid atop a base of stones, then overlaid by a second coat of stones and then covered with a final layer of gravel.
Crushed glass is approved by the Department of Environmental Protection for the purpose of creating roadbeds because it is biologically inert and will not taint runoff or the soil beneath the roadbed. The glass layer also helps facilitate drainage the way a layer of gravel does with the major advantage being that gravel must be purchased with taxpayer funds, while glass is a free by-product of the Town's recycling program.
Cantu noted that all recycling facilities across the land currently have an excess amount of crushed glass from non-recyclable containers, nearly all of which goes into landfills. "I plan to use more of the crushed glass to promote drainage on the rest of the roadway to and around the Recycling Center and to raise the elevation and level off our entire working pad."
Former Harpswell Recycling manager, Bob Webber, explained that in past years the Center used to sell a good deal of crushed glass to New England Recycling Corp. in Lisbon Falls and New England Recycling in Bangor for resale to construction firms. Back then, Webber explained, the material brought a good market price. However, he noted, "The price for crushed, recycled glass dropped steadily to where the middlemen could no longer afford to pick it up, and the Center had to deliver it to them. Today the bottom of the market has dropped out of the market altogether and crushed glass has very little or no commercial value. The nation's landfills and recycling centers are overflowing with this material and, to make things worse, it is very heavy and therefore costly to ship any distance."
In the past, customers used to take bags of crushed glass home for layering in their driveways and create a bed for garden walls etc, instead of buying crushed stone for the purpose. "They are welcome and, in fact, encouraged to do so," Cantu explained.
Unfortunately, the center's current equipment cannot grind the recycled glass to the finer particle size required for sale to commercial applications that still provide a large market for used glass, most of which require that the glass be ground to a consistency of sand or even powder. While the market for coarsely crushed glass is just about non-existent today, it is just possible that the availability of Federal Stimulus Funding to states for infrastructure creation and repair may promote a new wave of road building and a need, once again, for a lower cost alternative to crushed stone and gravel. In the meantime, Cantu noted, "We are looking into other local uses for this new, free resource."