Ripple Glass accepts all colors of food and beverage glass. Labels can stay on.
If you can see through it, we can likely recycle it!

For a complete list of what can and can’t be recycled, please click here. To download a printable flyer showing even more detailed information (with pictures!), click here.

The short answer—glass breaks.

And when it’s mixed with other recyclables, broken glass degrades and contaminates those materials, reducing their utility and causing them to be discarded or “downcycled” into lower-quality products. What’s more, in most curbside programs in which glass is collected along with other recyclables, up to half of the collected glass is unsalvageable, and ends up in the landfill. This leaves two options: sorting and segregating glass in existing recycling trucks, or running dedicated routes for glass. Collecting glass separately like Ripple does results in an up to 98% recovery rate.

If you live in the Kansas City metropolitan area, you can find them in stores near you here or order one online:

Currently, we do not. Ripple Glass’ processing plant is a heavy industrial environment, and we have a very small staff. You might be interested in this video which provides an behind-the-scenes look at how we process glass!

No, you don’t! All brown, green, blue, and clear food and beverage containers can be mixed together in the same collection bin.

Nope. You can leave all the labels on your containers, unless you’re into label peeling for some reason.

If you can take them off easily, that would be great! Otherwise, if the cap just won’t come off, don’t bother removing it. Corks stuck inside wine bottles are okay to leave in too.

Well, that would be nice. But it’s not essential. You may, however, decide that rinsing the containers keeps your home or garage smelling a bit fresher.

We wanted them to be attractive and distinctive, and we couldn’t figure out how to tie-dye ’em.

Ripple Glass cannot accept Pyrex, Corning ware, ceramics, dishware, or ham sandwiches. We can accept all glass food and beverage containers of any color (including mason jars and glass drinking vessels such as wine glasses).

We’ll keep this one short. No, no and no.

Sometimes. If the frames or bases are removed it’s probably okay. We cannot accept glass that is laminated (think windshields), or safety glass that is designed not to break. When in doubt, e-mail us at info@rippleglass.com.

You sure can! As long as they are glass, we’ll even take them if there’s a bit of wax remaining.

Great question! Boulevard distributes its beer in more than 30 states. No mechanism exists to collect the 40+ million bottles sold each year. Even if it did, the costs – and environmental impact – of transporting all those empty bottles back to Kansas City make the proposition impractical, and distinctly un-green. (That’s before considering the need to clean and sterilize the bottles to make them fit to reuse, a process that would use enormous amounts of energy and generate large streams of effluent.) And last but not least, a solution that involved only Boulevard bottles would leave the vast majority of glass generated in the KC area unaccounted for, and destined for the landfill.

Put simply – hard work and technological wizardry. Check out this video, or read below for more detail:

It all starts with you and your neighbors, depositing empty glass bottles and jars into those strikingly handsome purple collection bins. When a bin gets full, a local company picks it up, brings it to our processing plant, and dumps it into our receiving bunkers. Our operators feed the glass onto a conveyor, where it goes through a number of stages: decontamination (removal of all large non-glass materials), an initial crush to reduce whole containers into smaller pieces, drying, optical sorting to remove small contaminants and separate colors (the wizardry part), grinding and screening (guaranteeing size distribution matches customer specifications). The finished material – furnace-ready cullet – waits in silos to be loaded into trucks for transportation to our customers’ nearby facilities.

Glass cullet is the fancy term for glass that is cleaned, crushed and ready to be processed into new products including glass containers, fiberglass, reflective paints, abrasives, aggregates, and more. At Ripple Glass, we turn your recycled glass containers into cullet for a number of local customers, most notably Owens Corning, which uses it to make fiberglass insulation, and Ardagh, which turns it into new glass bottles, including those used by Boulevard Brewing Company.

Shoot us an e-mail at info@rippleglass.com with all of the details.

Provided enough notice, yes. We can loan out small bins for glass collection with 2-3 weeks minimum notice. For major events, please contact us at least 2 months prior to the event to discuss needs. E-mail us at info@rippleglass.com with the details!