No. 3 Memory Lane: Where’s the Bottle?

Get real. I bet you scrub and polish all your mayo jars before tossing them in the recycle bin.

Recycling is only this squeaky clean in iStock photos.

In truth, what a factory like Bullseye gets when it orders in recycled bottle cullet is just enough fragments of ceramic, pyrex cookware, metal contaminants and other assorted oddities to ruin entire melts of furnace glass.

This was the major obstacle to the use of post-consumer glass in Bullseye’s manufacturing operation by the late 1980s’s. The original idea made perfect sense: recycled bottles replaced the virgin sand, soda and lime in the factory’s formulas. A shorter melt cycle means lower fuel costs and less environmental impact. Ecologically and socially it was the right thing to do.

But by the 1980s mass container manufacturing plants like Owens-Illinois were competing more aggressively for the limited sources of recycled bottle cullet in the Pacific Northwest. (Originally these operations had only used about 10% recycle in their melts; today their usage is as high as 80%). Good news for the environment. Bad news for a small factory competing in the supply chain.

Meanwhile Bullseye’s color palette was becoming more sophisticated, necessitating greater control in formulation - not easy with an unpredictable raw material like recycled bottles. And most importantly, an emphasis on fusible glass meant tightened tolerances in compatibility testing - also not easy to achieve with the vagaries of post-consumer waste.

End result: by the 1990s Bullseye had reformulated its entire line to virgin raw materials. In doing so, we instituted some of the tightest raw materials testing in our industry and improved the glass for kilnforming.

But what about the values behind the original commitment to recycle?

Well, Bullseye’s never been a place without ideas. Some that are brilliant. Some that are all wet.

Stay tuned for Earth Days at Bullseye in the ’80s….