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….

For Gary, Toni and Cynthia: a few more “where we came from” pictures on the way to Talking Values.

This one is Dan – SPF clueless – in 1974. He, Ray and Boyce were building the Bullseye factory, brick by recycled brick.

Most of the building materials for the furnace room came from Zidel’s, a salvage yard in Portland’s south waterfront, a junk-lover’s paradise where dismantled naval vessels gave up their innards to the inveterate artist-tinkerers whose recipe for glassblowing, commerce, and hard-partying pretty much summed up the Zeitgeist of Portland’s ‘60s-sprouted entrepreneurs.
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An short ode to guys with the b—s to take it on the chin.

Yesterday I promised a discussion of the Values History of Bullseye and started with mention of some of the old staples: ingenuity, candor, frugality etc. etc. – the diet that many so-called “Americans” were raised on in the ‘50s.

But first, a quick detour North.

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Recycling values. In the Beginning (1973) Bullseye glass was made of recycled bottle cullet. Thirty-five years later, a lot has changed. And a lot has not.

If you happened to grow up in America in the 1950’s as I did, you’re probably familiar with the self-congratulatory litany of virtues we were raised to believe were uniquely (US) American: inventiveness (aka “Yankee Ingenuity”), self-sufficiency, frugality, honesty, candor – all the Honest Abe stuff we truly believed contrasted us to “Old Europe” (even before a moron among us put a name to our arrogance).

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BEFORE: Ray Ahlgren & Dan Schwoerer, 1973.

After 33 years in business, Bullseye looks a lot different from the outside. But the soul is the same. So now, finally, I get around to the point of this first week of blogs: who we are, who Bullseye is.

Who we are is who we’ve always been: a slightly eccentric little factory driven by people with a lot of energy, passion about glass, some oddball ideas and a commitment to learning. In a serious, relatively professional way.
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