Can you recycle glass bottles and jars?
Usually yes
Yes in most places. Empty and rinse it, leave the label on, and put metal lids in loose rather than screwed back on. A minority of programs have pulled glass from curbside collection, so it is worth checking yours.
Follow it down the line
Three different questions hide inside "is this recyclable?", and the answer can change at each step.
The material · Yes
Is the material recyclable?
Container glass is the strongest case in the whole waste stream. It can be melted and reformed endlessly with no loss in quality or purity, which is true of almost nothing else here: paper fiber shortens, plastic degrades, and glass does not. Recycled glass also pays its own way in the furnace. Every 10% of cullet in the mix cuts furnace energy by nearly 3%, so a glass plant wants the material for reasons beyond good citizenship. Color does not matter to the chemistry. Nothing about the material argues against recycling it.
The facility · Sometimes
Will a sorting facility recover it?
This is the layer that decides it, and the problem is that glass breaks. In a single-stream cart it shatters during collection and again on the tipping floor, so a facility does not so much sort glass as sweep up the fragments left after everything else has been pulled out. Broken glass grinds into paper and cardboard, lowering what those are worth, and picks up contamination itself on the way. Processors will not always take the result: MRF glass can be harder to clean than glass collected separately, and when markets turned, many began charging to accept it rather than paying for it. Glass is not inherently expensive to handle, which is why some facilities do fine with it. It is expensive to handle badly.
Source: Waste Dive: glass recycling may be at a turning point
Your curbside program · Varies
Will your curbside program take it?
Most programs still take bottles and jars of any color in the ordinary cart, and the preparation is easy: empty, clean and dry, labels can stay on, and metal lids go in loose rather than screwed back on, because loose lids sort correctly with the metal cans. The exceptions are real though, and they are a deliberate choice rather than neglect. Fairfax County pulled glass out of curbside collection entirely and moved it to staffed drop-off, because the glass leaving its regional facility carried too much contamination to sell. Drop-off glass from that program runs under 2% contamination. Losing the convenience bought them glass that actually gets recycled.
Sources: CuyahogaRecycles: glass bottles and jars, Resource Recycling: county bolsters glass recycling by pulling it from curbside
What you need to do
- Empty, clean and dry. A rinse is enough; it does not need washing
- Leave labels on, they burn off in the furnace
- Put metal lids in loose rather than screwed on, so they sort with the metal cans
- Do not break bottles to save space, whole glass is easier to recover and safer to handle
Where else it can go
Staffed drop-off
Where curbside does not take glass, a drop-off point usually does, and the glass it collects is far cleaner because it was never mixed with paper.
Bottles and jars only. The same sites almost never want drinking glasses or ovenware.
Bottle deposit return
In deposit states, returning containers gets the cleanest possible stream and your deposit back.
Only covers containers carrying a deposit, which is usually beverages rather than food jars.
Reuse the jar
Jars are free storage containers with lids that already fit. This beats recycling on every measure, since it skips the melting entirely.
Common mistakes
- Screwing the lid back on, which sends a metal lid through the glass stream instead of the metal one
- Adding drinking glasses, ovenware or a broken mirror because they are also glass, when those melt at a different temperature and ruin the batch
- Assuming glass is accepted because it always has been, in a program that quietly dropped it