Columbia Adds Second Glass Recycling Drop-Off Site

Columbia has added a second free spot to recycle glass, giving Boone County residents — including Rocheport-area households who’ve had nowhere to take glass since a 2025 tornado — one more option for keeping bottles and jars out of the landfill. The city’s Utilities Department announced the new bin this month, expanding its partnership with Ripple Glass, the company that already supplies the purple collection bin at the city landfill.

Where can you drop off glass, and what’s accepted?

There are now two sites:

• City landfill, 5700 Peabody Road. Enter through the scalehouse ramp; the bin sits just past it, near the small-vehicle refuse drop-off. Open 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday.
• 1242 Ashland Road, in the contractor parking area on the University of Missouri campus. The city hasn’t posted separate hours for this site.

Both bins take transparent glass food and beverage containers of any color — labels can stay on, but lids and caps need to come off, and containers should be empty. Slide items through the porthole one at a time; don’t leave oversized pieces on top of or beside the bin. Window glass, porcelain and milk glass don’t belong in either one, and glass still can’t go out with curbside recycling — the city says it won’t accept glass in curbside collection at all.

Why does a second bin matter right now?

It’s a small addition, but it lands at a moment when recycling options around Boone County are thin. An EF1 tornado tore through Columbia’s Material Recovery Facility on April 20, 2025, and Boone County’s own county-wide drop-off program — the system Rocheport and other smaller towns relied on — has been suspended ever since, with the bins removed from every site and no timeline to bring them back, according to the county’s resource management office. The city brought back its own recycling drop-off events at the Grissum Building last August, but glass was the odd one out, since it still isn’t picked up curbside anywhere in the county.

The city is calling the Ripple Glass partnership a trial and says it will consider adding more bins depending on how it goes. It’s one of several small environmental additions around the county this fall — Boone County also welcomed a new conservation educator to its classrooms last month.

By the Good News Desk