Paulie the Pulverizer (aka The Glass Crusher) celebrates 1st birthday

CHELAN - 911 Glass Rescue celebrated Paulie the Pulverizer’s one-year birthday with a party on July 23, at the Chelan Recyle Center, located at 23235 Highway 97A across from Walmart. Paulie is a big girl, and many came to drop off their bottles to be crushed and to offer your best wishes. Paulie has been faithfully crushing the Lake Chelan Valley’s glass for a whole year. She has now helped the Lake Chelan Rotary’s 911 Glass Rescue project to rescue a whopping 250,000 pounds of glass from the landfill. Glass that has a new life as sand and aggregate being utilized in a myriad of local applications.
It seems the uses for the  glass sand and aggregate are as unlimited as the human imagination. Paulie’s crushed glass graces trails and walkways throughout our community, does double-duty in gardens as a high-quality mulch, weed barrier and pest repellant, has grown huge, beautiful tomatoes in hydroponic applications, provided traction in winter when local vendors ran out of ice melt, and much, much more.
Paulie could not have done it alone, though. Many sponsors, volunteers, and supporters have wholeheartedly embraced 911 Glass Rescue, and they have exceeded their year one goal of 100 tons and made this project a model for what one determined community can do to save our environment. Without the financial support of local wineries and other businesses, as well as their partnership with the City of Chelan and a generous grant from the County of Chelan, Paulie would be serving some other community today, and local glass would still be going to the dump.
And without the Lake Chelan Rotary’s  valued volunteers, Paulie would not have been fed all that glass to munch. This has truly been a community project, and it continues to grow, with record volumes and more and more interest from within and without our Valley. If you would like to volunteer they have tasks suitable for all ages and abilities. To volunteer go to www.911glassrescue.org, and click on the volunteer tab on the home page.
911 Glass Rescue is open every Saturday morning  from 9 a.m.-noon to accept glass.
911 Glass Rescue has set the standard for community glass recycling. The Lake Chelan Rotary regularly receive inquiries from around the country, as other municipalities look for solutions to the problem of glass recycling. Here in the Chelan Valley, they have solved it.