After nearly 30 years of recycling our glass bottles, we citizens of Jefferson County are now being directed to dump them in the trash? What craziness is this? Our used glass bottles are …
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After nearly 30 years of recycling our glass bottles, we citizens of Jefferson County are now being directed to dump them in the trash? What craziness is this? Our used glass bottles are NOT trash!
According to recent Leader and Seattle Times articles, a large manufacturing company near Seattle that had been making new glass bottles out of recycled ones (from Washington and parts of Oregon) for years, recently shut down. The customers they were selling to – such as breweries – discovered they could buy their glass bottles cheaper from China!
As a result, citizens in two U. S. states may all be being told, as we are here in Jefferson County, to throw their glass bottles into the trash if they want them picked up!
A move backward in evolution. This is international trade agreement fallout, folks – in this case specifically, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) promoted years ago by Derek Kilmer against the peoples’ loudly expressed will. International trade “deals” are just another way to plunder earth’s resources with greater impunity.
Throwing glass in the garbage -- is unconscionable.
We must remove essential services and public utilities from the market economy, where they become vulnerable to profit-driven market fluctuations. If private facilities cannot make a living competing with China, where workers are enslaved, these facilities need to be publicly subsidized, like our farms, or publicly owned and operated as non-profits, like the PUDs of Jefferson and Clallam Counties.
The glass recycling plant must not close! It should be subsidized or purchased with public money.
Please join us in an effort to save the company near Seattle that uses our recycled glass bottles, so it can continue production.
We imagine a group of counties buying and operating this facility. How to put this together? A ballot measure?
Meanwhile, please join us in calling on our county commissioners to select a site, and have Murrey’s Disposal continue to pick up our precious used glass and store it there.
Alea Waters and Lang Russel
Port Townsend
