Glass recycling can be expensive, especially due to the heavy weight of materials and therefore high costs of transportation. Glass recycling must also go through processing that sorts the glass by color. However, there is a great demand for glass recyclables from companies that want to process it, but the current recycling system has not yet met that demand. Industry standards are high, and glass often comes to recycling facilities too contaminated to work with.

An alternative to single-stream recycling processes is a "bottle bill" which gives citizens incentives to bring in used bottles for a return. Another solution could be introducing glass-only recycling bins which would decrease the rate of recycling contamination.

We can look at many global successes in glass recycling to improve our own local processes.