Boulevard Brewing Company was part of a big problem with no easy solution. More than 160 million pounds of glass was ending up in Kansas City area landfills each year. Boulevard, the largest specialty beer brewery in the Midwest, was contributing 10 million bottles annually. Worse still, there was no processing or collection facility in Kansas City to recycle the glass. Here was the perfect opportunity for Boulevard to help solve a local problem of which it was a part AND create a good story for the company … the story of Ripple Glass.
In 2009, Boulevard built the $6 million Ripple Glass recycling plant and set up 70 purple glass recycling containers across Kansas City. In 2011, the company is hoping to break even on the cost of building and operating the plant. Glass arrives at the plant where it is cleaned, crushed and then sent to Owens Corning and other fiberglass manufacturers, as well as other bottling companies to be reused. 
“We rise and fall on how much raw material we can attract by getting people to recycle glass, so we can break even financially on the cost of the plant,” Boulevard CFO Jeff Krum said. “You can only recycle paper so many times but you can recycle glass infinitely, so this makes sense. There is a huge demand for recycled glass in Kansas City. Owens Corning alone would take all the recycled glass that we could provide them.”
When the Ripple Glass plant was built in 2009, just 3 percent of Kansas Citians recycled glass. Today, about 15 percent are glass recyclers and Boulevard hopes to increase that percentage to the national average of 30 percent.
Other companies are finding ways to team up with Boulevard and Ripple Glass. Deffenbaugh Industries, for example, is launching a pilot project with Boulevard in which it is collecting glass from 80 area restaurants and bars. United Missouri Bank is promoting Ripple Glass in its customer communications and providing glass collection bins at its various bank locations. The partner list is growing.
If your Kansas City company doesn’t have a “do good for the community” story yet, you can easily make Ripple Glass part of your story. You can contact Ripple Glass to obtain a purple class collection bin for your company location. Then you can encourage your employees and customers to recycle glass.
You can add some fun to your recycling efforts by encouraging your company’s departments to compete in the amount of glass they bring in for recycling. To get all the mileage you can out of this do-good story, you can state that your company is a proud supporter of glass recycling and feature the Ripple Glass logo on your website and other communications. Now that’s a story you can feel good about being a part of!
Contact CHS Communications to learn more about ways to create a good story for your company.
Say what you will about Al Gore’s political career but he has been on the forefront of some trends. He was one of the first to sound the bell about global warming way before it was in vogue. Now he’s presenting the global warming story with possible solutions in the first full-length interactive book. Called Our Choice, it was designed for the iPad, iPhone and iTouch. The future has arrived in publishing and it is good!
