iBOONDOCK

What do you do with your broken bottles or glasses? Do you just throw them out with the rest of your garbage? If you do, that’s considered an environmental sin. It’s just as bad as McDonalds and Jollibbee using all those plastic cups and styrophor plates.

So what should we do with our broken bottles then? Well, let’s make them into glass cullets, that’s what.

I heard of glass cullets back in the 1990s when I visited the recycling place in Sagada which was located near Ken Kitongan or the bottomless pit. [If you haven’t heard of Sagada’s bottomless pit, it’s between the cemetery and the old St. Mary’s School laboratory.]

Anyways, while visiting that recycling center I noticed that they were crushing broken bottles and glasses. I was told that the Glass Cullet, among its many other uses, can be added to the sand and cement which one uses to build a house or any construction project. I was like, “Whoo, wouldn’t those pieces of broken glass cut into the tires of a car when they’re used in a road project?”

Stupid question, no? I was assured that it won’t happen like that. In fact, I was told that crushed glass cullets behave like natural sand. Natural sand, of course, don’t cut into the tires of passing cars, right? Right.

Anyways, I’m not sure whether the Sagada folks who were recycling these broken bottles are still at it. I certainly hope they are. It would be sad if, like practically every worthwhile undertaking in these islands in the Pacific, their venture dies an unlamented death.