- [Announcer] Throughout the country.

People are planting the seeds of innovation harvesting a of bounty of ideas to help care for the only home we have, planet earth with billions of people on earth.

It is more important than ever to open our eyes and minds to alternative ideas.

So it's new and old about food, energy, resources, health, housing, and more.

The core of sustainability is meeting the needs of today's society without compromising the world for future generations.

In this series, our field reporters will explore eco-friendly ideas and lifestyles that help to make our world a little bit better.

Welcome to My World Too, short stories of sustainable living and earthly innovations.

There's a company that wants people to stop treating glass like garbage let's join Mahryn Rose to discover the benefits of taking broken glass bottles and turning it into new products.

- Thank you so much for having us here.

Why don't you tell me your name role and where we are right now?

- My name is Lydia Gibson and I am the director of corporate development for Ripple Glass.

We're located on the East side of Kansas city and we're here at our processing location where we recycle all the glass that we collect.

- [Mahryn] How and why did Ripple Glass get started?

- [Lydia] So in the early two thousands, one of our local breweries Boulevard Brewing Company discovered that there were thousands and thousands of glass bottles going out into our community without a good option for them to be recycled.

So they decided to found Ripple Glass to solve both the problem of collection and processing of glass and started up a network of over a hundred collection bins across the Kansas city Metro to collect glass and then bring it here to our processing facility to recycle it into its next life.

- [Mahryn] How much glass do you get per day?

- [Lydia] Per day can be over a hundred tons or even a little more a little less in a year.

We recycle over 40,000 tons of glass.

- That's a lot.

And what are some of the challenges in recycling all that glass?

- So getting it to our facility and getting it here efficiently is a great problem.

So those drop off bins fill at different rates all across the Metro.

So we have a great program manager who keeps track of the schedules and try to keep those bins coming in as full as possible but not overflowing.

And we work with communities outside of Kansas city.

So we work with them to get as full of a truckload of glass possible to bring it here for recycling.

- [Mahryn] What is the geographic reach of Ripple Glass?

- [Lydia] So we're a regional business.

We actually collect glass from nine States across the Midwest region and over a hundred communities in those States.

- [Mahryn] What States are you in right now?

- So obviously Kansas and Missouri.

We also work in Nebraska, Iowa up into a little bit of South Dakota, Illinois, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and again a little bit into Kentucky.

Like I said, it's a very regional business.

Glass is really heavy.

And so it really can not move very far, very efficiently.

And that's why it's a really a local type of business.

Each program is a little bit different.

We encourage cities to use what they've got.

So if they've got maybe a bin or collection bin that doesn't look quite like ours or they have a different system, that's fine.

We're just interested in making sure we keep the glass out of the trash.

So among the communities we work with there's a lot of interest in, especially the smaller towns and smaller communities who may not have access to the same recycling systems that may be common on the Eastern West coast.

So our drop-off program model is one that's used by hundreds of communities across those States to efficiently collect glass and provide that service for the residents.

- [Mahryn] I see.

So it varies across cities.

- [Lydia] Sure.

Recycling glass for every six tons of recycled glass that is used to manufacture new glass.

Oop I hear some more coming in right now.

That's music to our ears.

That is more glass coming in the door, making a bigger impact.

(soft upbeat music) We love that sound.

It's not a quiet one but it's one that's positive for us.

That means people out there in the community are doing their job.

- [Mahryn] Excellent.

(glass clattering) (soft music) So this is where our glass recycling process starts when all the glass coming in from the Kansas City Metro and surrounding States comes in on either big trucks or small trucks.

And it's dumped into these bunkers here and we mix it in with the other kinds of glass that we collect.

- [Mahryn] What kind of glass can you recycle?

- All sorts of bottles, jars, liquor bottles, beer wine, spirits, but there's also a whole lot of other food and beverage materials that are packaged in glass, such as pickles jam and jelly, jars, candle jars as well.

Anything that's a clear glass or a colored glass.

We can recycle here.

Things that we can't recycle are things like mirrors or ceramics.

Or your coffee mug, they may kind of feel like it might be glass, but it's actually made out of stone.

And so we can't accept those kinds of things, but most of the things that you purchase at a grocery store you can recycle here at Ripple.

(soft upbeat music) So this is where the process begins right here in this hopper.

We load about a ton of glass at a time, and then it flows through our processing fan about 12 tons an hour.

So it travels right on this conveyor belt from that hopper.

And it begins the process of getting ground down.

It goes through pretty quick.

It only takes about an hour for a jar to make its way through the hopper, onto the other side and ready for its next life as a new jar a new bottle or fiberglass insulation.

- [Mahryn] Fascinating.

(upbeat music) - So inside the processing plant.

This is where the glass is sized, cleaned and ground down to the right specification for its end use.

So what we do is we run a magnet over it to take out any of the caps, labels, lids, anything that kind of made its way into the process.

And then we start crushing it down to finer and finer size.

And then we've got equipment here that actually shoots beams of light and what we call optical sortition.

So it's looking to see what color are the glasses and whether it's actually glass.

And so if it's not, it'll shoot it out with a super quick and precise burst of air.

And then if it is, it goes on to be crushed into the size that's ready to be used for fiberglass insulation or its size to be used for a new container bottles.

- [Mahryn] I see.

And where does all the non-recyclable items go?

- [Lydia] So the very little bit, that's not, we actually use for beneficial reuse.

And so it can be used as like a road aggregate or kind of like a gravel base.

(soft upbeat music) So once the glass has gone through the process it ends up here in this large silo.

So when glass is recycled it's turned into what we call poet.

That's just it's furnace ready form.

So we store about 300 tons of furnace ready poet in the silo and ship that out almost every day.

- What's it used for?

- It's used primarily for fiberglass insulation.

The finished product almost looks like sand.

It's very finely ground.

So it melts really easily to be spawned into almost like cotton candy, like strands that goes into your walls in your home.

- [Mahryn] Wow it's so useful.

- Glass is a great product.

It has unique benefits that all other materials don't have.

It's completely nerd.

It doesn't interact with anything else.

And it's used in more things that you can probably think of.

- Tell me about the sustainability benefits of recycling.

- So for every six tons of recycled glass that are used in manufacturing we avoid one ton of greenhouse gas emissions.

This happens because the recycled glass melts at a lower temperature in the process of glass manufacturing.

So those fiberglass manufacturers or container manufacturers who use that recycled glass don't need to use as much energy.

It also displaces raw materials.

So the sand, and soda ash and other things that go into making new glass don't have to be mined and they can stay in the ground.

So our main customers here are for fiberglass insulation which goes into your home and your walls to help save energy as well as new beer bottles.

So I mentioned that we were founded by Boulevard Brewing Company.

So they actually create a closed loop with the glass that we send down to a container to be made into new glass bottles.

Those come right back up to be into Kansas city to get filled up with beer and then enjoyed right back into the process in our purple bands.

So after the glass makes its way all the way through the plant, this is one of our final products.

This Amber Glass is what's going to be used to, made into new glass bottles just like the ones that the brewery uses.

So this is what it looks like in its finished form.

It's all ready to go and ready to be melted down into a new bottle and this new life.

- [Mahryn] Amazing.

It's almost beautiful.

- [Lydia] I think it is, the sound is almost relaxing.

It's almost like a waterfall.

- [Mahryn] It means lots coming in.

- [Lydia] It's a good thing.

We're really excited for the future of Ripple.

We think we've come across a really good model and way to recycle glass efficiently.

And we're excited to share that with communities outside the immediate Kansas city region.

- [Mahryn] So exciting to see it expanding across the nation.

- [Lydia] Fingers crossed.

I think we've got a great idea and we know that a lot of other communities out there that are looking for similar ideas on how to do glass recycling better and we're really excited to do it.

- [Mahryn] I had no idea what all went into recycling.

- [Lydia] It's a pretty complicated process, but it's well worth it.

Our goal is to keep as many glass bottles and jar at the landfills possible and fill these purple bands up with them and continue to make a big impact across our community.

- Thank you so much for showing us around Lydia.

- Very happy to Mahryn.

(soft upbeat music) - [Announcer] An artist in Colorado with a respect for nature and native American influences considers his greatest masterpiece to be his custom built passive solar home.

- I talk to so many people and they go oh you'll never get off the grid.

You'll never get off the grid.

How about 50% off the grid?

How about 70% off the grid?

I've seen a lot of houses being in the real estate business.

I've gone through thousands of them.

And I finally decided that I wanted to design my own sustainable passive solar house.

Yeah, my name's Allan McMullen.

We're here in Monument, Colorado.

We're at 7,300 feet.

I have a fine arts degree three and three-dimensional sculpture and design.

And out of all the art I've created in my life I really consider this my masterpiece.

I got to make aesthetic decisions right down to the minutia right down to the light switches.

(soft upbeat music) Well my personal space has always been important to me.

And after living years in different houses and so forth the only way to get to get that space is to design it and build it from the ground up.

I call this the art house because it's designed not only to hold art, but to be art.

There's some sculptural elements I designed into the house that just make it more interesting.

Passive solar is simply orienting the home actually slightly Southeast of due South so that you utilize the morning sun.

When it comes up, it begins generating heat.

Well, we get real winters here.

So heating is probably the primary factor.

Yeah.

Windows are very important.

You have to look at the U factor or the R-rating of the window.

These walls are R-21, but a window is R-2, A cheap window's R-2.

So windows selection, dual pane, thermal pane, sometimes triple pane is important.

And then minimizing windows on the North side of the house, the cold side.

I've talked to builders, who've said, oh no, no, it's too much sun.

Well, they don't understand.

In the summertime, the sun goes straight over.

(soft music) Living close to the earth and sustainably is not sometimes what you do, but what you don't do.

You don't turn on the air conditioner.

You don't have to turn on the lights all the time.

You don't have to turn the heat up.

The well-designed house will do all this for you.

This utilizes one of the old turn of the centuries ideas of convection.

We have high transom windows here and you just leave them crack.

The rain won't come in and the house through convection cools naturally.

(soft music) There's a lot of materials today that are sustainable materials.

A lot of people overlook.

The basic premise on this house was to build the same house at the same cost but through design and moving materials around come up with a sustainable house.

We've got Bamboo floors here, which is a grass, not a wood.

Bamboo is in the Guinness World Book of Records as being the fastest growing plant on the planet.

It can grow 35 inches a day.

You can literally watch it grow.

We've got skylights here.

I don't have to turn on lights a lot of the time because the natural light is prominent through every room in this house.

We don't have forest air heat.

We have hot water, baseboard heat which tends to be more efficient last longer than just hot air going on and off.

We've got a EPDM rubber roof, hail resistant roof here.

There's other houses they'll wrap around here last summer.

One house replaced the roof one month and then the hail came through the next month and they replaced it again.

That's going to the landfill where essentially this is more sustainable.

(soft music) Insulation is the cheapest upgrade you can do to a house.

Just insulate it as much as you can to hold the passive solar heat gain in the house and keep it from escaping.

We use formaldehyde free insulation in this house when we built it and architecture and in building today there's a lot of off gassing.

So these are low VOC paints used throughout this house but formaldehyde and insulation tends to off gas.

So you want to keep off gassing to a minimum.

The carpet is recyclable.

It doesn't go into the landfill.

When it's torn out it gets recycled into other fiber products of some kind.

(soft upbeat music) Passive solar gain is simple because you don't do anything except let it happen.

So I keep electronic things to a minimum.

Although as time goes on they become more affordable and more usable.

But for instance, here in this house we have motion sensor light switches for the closets, the utility room.

You'll never leave a light on and waste energy with the motion sensors because they turn off after you leave.

So basically lights turn on and off.

As you move through this house.

Again, we're conserved.

Sustainability is all about conserving energy.

We've designed the drainage patterns on this house to come off in areas where we want to landscape.

So we can utilize a natural runoff from the roof versus having to turn on the hose all the time.

Even my driveway is recycled concrete.

They tear up all these curb and gutters.

They grind them up and the base coat for my driveway is recycled concrete.

So we try to re utilize as many products as we can.

Cite specific building is so important.

It's important that you cite the house on the lot correctly, and that you also cite it to minimize the impact on the land down in the Southwest here.

We're part of the Southwest.

The top soil is very fragile.

If you scrape it and cut it, it never comes back unless you really invest a lot of money in landscaping.

So citing it correctly and placing it correctly in the lay of the land instead of to the street is as essential.

So we cited this right in here.

So there was very little landscaping to be done.

The natural landscaping comes right after the house.

It all faces South.

(soft music) Well a lot of people wants to live closer to the land.

They want to be sustainable.

They want to do the right thing but now here's where the artist comes out in me.

You can create sustainable boxes, but they're still boxes.

So there has to be an element of surprise.

There has to be angles.

There has to be level changes in a house.

The great room is dead.

A sustainable house doesn't have a 16 foot high ceiling.

They're hard to heat.

They're acoustically tough.

So you've got, bring things down, bring them closer in keep the rooms smaller and intimate.

And all of this adds up in the end and the finished home.

It creates a more intimate setting for your lifestyle.

Yeah.

If more people wanted to take care of the planet and if they wanted to live closer to nature they would create a demand.

And that demand would filter over to the builders to the landscapers and people like that.

And they will begin to meet that demand and just starting to happen but it needs to happen really on an intellectual basis.

People have to understand it's better to live sustainably.

It's better to design sustainable dwellings than to just knock up these boxes and, blow and go.

I had a fabulous childhood.

I grew up in a rural area, South of Santa Fe.

We had horses, my best friends were native American kids.

We ran all over the place, made bows and arrows.

The tri-cultural influence down there was very strong in terms of the Anasazi Indians and so forth.

You just take all of this and you keep mixing it and re-mixing it.

I mean, some of the best principles the Anasazi cliff dwellings all face South.

So in the winter time, they stay warm.

You just take all of these ideas and you keep remixing them.

And it's the age of Aquarius.

We just keep changing and evolving as time goes on and houses, dwellings really need to evolve.

And I'm happy to say, they're starting to do that now with sustainable practices and sustainable living.

- [Announcer] Imagine the tons of yard waste and storm damaged trees and trimmings that fill up landfills, Kyle Stanley visits a company that turns all that organic matter back into mulch to use in your yard.

- Hey you must be Kevin.

- I am Kevin.

Nice to meet you, Kyle.

- Good to meet you.

- Appreciate you coming out.

- Thanks for having us.

- Thanks for coming to Missouri Organic.

- Yeah.

Excited to see what you guys do.

What do you make from all your wood products here?

- Yeah, so basically we take in green waste so brush, grass and leaves.

We make mulch, compost, top soil and soil mixes.

And we also create lumber too.

So, we have a side business called the Urban Lumber company that actually takes the larger logs and actually makes slab lumber.

- And why not just put all this in a landfill?

- Well, when this organic waste like this starts to break down it creates methane gas obviously.

And the methane gas is harmful for the atmosphere, creates CO2 and methane and creates global warming.

So ultimately trying to keep this stuff out of the landfill is really the goal.

And then what happens is, is we make it into products.

So we've got mulches and composts that then go back in to create soil health and actually break down and microbes get into the soil and actually creates better soil.

So better water retention, CO2 sequestering and things like that.

So it really is the ultimate recycling.

I mean you're taking a material that would have caused a problem in a landfill and then turn that right back into a product that's actually going to help the environment versus hurt it.

- [Kyle] Right.

Very cool.

(soft music) - So Kevin my knowledge base on all this is as bad as deep as this mud puddle here, all I know is I bring stuff out to the curb and put it in a brown bag and it disappears.

- Well so basically what we do here is we take in brush, which is to you this kind of stuff here behind us.

Basically we'd contract with tree trimmers and landscapers.

We also do municipalities through the area that pickup curbside and they also bring in a storm damage and stuff like that.

So, basically what we do is we take that material in and we grind it up and we make mulch out of it.

Or if it's in your brown paper bag, like you put on the curb, trash companies go around and collect that stuff and bring it in and we take and make compost out of that stuff.

- Okay.

So the smaller stuff becomes compost and bigger stuff behind us here becomes the mulch.

- Exactly.

So gives difference between what I call fiber and compost.

So all this material behind this is fiber material.

For me, it's a, becomes a base product for a mulch product whether it's brown, black, red, or natural and then the other leafy material and the compostable material becomes a more of a nature wise compost what they call it.

- Very cool.

(soft music) So what is this here?

Is this your finished product?

- Yeah.

So this is our premium one mulch.

This is the basis of all the mulch that we sell whether it's brown, black, red, this premium one this natural mulch comes from a very coarse ground material.

The brush that you saw earlier goes through the grinder goes through this machine, goes through another grinder.

And then on the screening deck the screening deck separates coarse and fines.

And then this obviously this is the good material that we're selling.

- [Kyle] Is this machine actually grinding it up or is it just a separating-- - Actually that whole process there is another grind and then a screen to separate sizes of material.

- So does both.

- Oh yeah, absolutely.

- So what happens with these big guys?

- So when we get big, long, straight pieces like this we turn these into lumber.

So nothing goes to waste.

This will be in the trailer, go down to Urban Lumber company and we'll get sawed up into making slab wood like bars and tables and furniture.

And then any wastes that they have actually comes back to this facility and we actually make mulch out of it.

So nothing we do goes to waste.

- So none of these are coming out of Pristine forests.

- No hearing the city, Kansas city, we've got thousands of acres of parkways and Park lands and just a lots of trees.

I mean, it's one of the biggest urban forests in the nation.

So we've always got these trees that are constantly coming down, either via, ice storms or wind storms.

We are not out there harvesting trees.

(soft music) What we're doing here is we're actually colored mulch.

So the material that he's going to put in there is the premium one, which we just saw going into the machine and we use a basically a food grade, colorant environmentally friendly and water tumble it through the machine.

And it comes out as red, black or brown mulch.

- So is this the final product here?

- Yeah.

So this is all the hard work that you've seen happen today.

So all the mulch in the compost process that we did we saw happen, it ends up in a bag like this goes to lots of different retail locations and gets sold regionally throughout Kansas city.

- So my mom will probably end up with this bag in her backyard.

- She absolutely could definitely.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Share your sustainability story or learn more about sustainability and earth friendly innovations at myworldtoo.com - Having the four walls and a door that is just for them being able to see that pride that they get to have when they walk in the door.

And then they also get to feel that sense of security.

These houses are all built trauma informed care.

There's one way in there's windows.

On one side, they don't face windows on the other side of the house that it was all done intentionally for the safety privacy security of the vets that we have living here.

- There's so many older, beautiful buildings in our country and across the world that when possible to restore and keep those buildings is then a sustainable approach to try to preserve and keep older structures and rebuild them.

- It certainly is.

In fact, it's one of the most sustainable things that you can do in design right now.

- Because it's there already all that energy that was created to make the materials and construct that building has already occurred.

And so to reuse it, you're not going to have to do that again, if it was a new building.

- So by the time you've saved the structure and what we call the envelope of a building you've saved close to 80% of the embodied energy of that building.

It takes a lot of materials and it takes a lot of energy to build a building.

(upbeat music) - Yes, so this is all the hard work that you've seen Ave. (cheerful music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music)