Successful Fundraising Campaign Brings New Glass Crusher To Powell, Wyoming

After a long hiatus, glass is again being recycled in Powell, Wyoming!

Photos: Powell Valley Recycling

Excerpt from Powell Tribune article by CJ Baker, May 2025

After a long hiatus, glass is again being recycled in Powell. It was over a decade ago that the Powell Valley Recycling Center stopped accepting glass, but “people have still been grumbling about it,” said Sue Woods.

“I’ve heard about it ever since I moved here,” Woods said, “and I said to myself, ‘Well, I’m going to fix that problem.’”

She and three other community members — Denise Kelsay, Jayson Nicholson, and Luke Robertson — banded together and launched a $120,000 fundraising campaign to buy a glass pulverizer for the recycling center last year. They wound up hitting their goal in about six months.

“I think that just testifies to the fact that they really want to recycle glass,” Woods said.
On Friday, the “Crush It” group and Powell Valley Recycling will celebrate the newly installed machine with an open house at the center…Powell is joining a couple of other recycling centers around the state in accepting glass, but unlike facilities in Jackson and Sheridan, the local facility will turn the material into a sellable product instead of paying to ship it elsewhere. The new pulverizer turns glass items into sand and a kind of pea gravel that can be used in a variety of landscaping projects.

Given the high cost of shipping out glass, the Crush It group concluded early on that “if we were going to recycle it here locally, it had to be a finished product that we could also use locally,” Nicholson explained.
They also didn’t want to add costs for the center, Woods said, “so this was perfect…

Dozens of donors
…Preparing for the campaign took research — including seeking advice from glass recyclers in Orcas Island, Washington, in Michigan and other parts of the country. Once the local group had hammered out a plan, they sought and received the formal blessing of the Powell Valley Recycling Board. The campaign kicked off in the spring of 2024.

Unlike other recycling operations in Wyoming, which are run by municipalities, Powell Valley Recycling is an independent nonprofit. That proved key to the campaign’s success, Woods said, “because people are happy to donate money, but they don’t want to donate it to the City of Powell.”

The Crush It group used a variety of methods to reach potential donors, ranging from grant applications to social media to making in-person pitches to recyclers stopping by the center.

The GP-MegaMini

Andela Products’ GP-MegaMini is a customizable glass pulverizing machine featuring an integrated trommel that automatically separates glass into 1/8” minus sand, 1/8”-3/8” gravel, and non-glass residue—eliminating the need for hand sorting. The resulting glass product is smooth-edged and suitable for use in construction, pipe bedding, and landscaping. It includes a flared infeed hopper for easy loading of full cases or buckets of glass, and its frame is designed to discharge into self-dumping hoppers, minimizing downtime for bin emptying. Additional features include:

• Process 1500-2000 pounds of glass per/hour.
• Reduces all types of glass down to a rounded glass particle 3/8 of an inch or smaller.
• Infeed all types of glass, no precleaning required.
• Produce both a glass sand and glass aggregate, without sharp edges.
• Integrated trommel screen separates out the residue (caps, labels, and corks).
• Compact and integrated unit with Pulverizer, Trommel Screen, and Electrical Controls.