Last year, Sunflower Diversified Services purchased a grinder, allowing the recycling business to grow.  Now, glass can be ground and made useful locally by the Barton County Road and Bridge Department for paving our rural roads.  This was fantastic news this week.  It shows that recycling is certainly worthwhile.
But now a new problem has emerged.  The 20 tons of glass produced by Sunflower so far isn’t enough to meet the demand.   Road and Bridge Director Dale Phillips said he’d like to increase the mix of rock and glass to five percent glass, but that’s going to require 1,000 to 1,500 tons of glass.  
So, now the solution is in the hands of the people in this county, at least in part.  If every family made a point of designating a separate container for disposing glass containers and dropping it off at Sunflower, we can all help to provide jobs and keep the cost of repairing our roads down.  The space and the time is minimal, but it does require new habits to be formed.  Forming new habits, it’s been shown, is a difficult thing to do--unless the benefits outweigh the difficulties.  Hopefully, saving money, keeping money local, and increasing the life of our landfill are big enough benefits to make a difference.  

--Veronica Coons