Mat Cornett and Tamara Ovdenk hate the sound of glass breaking in a Dumpster.

It sounds like landfills filling up and money being spent unnecessarily. Or maybe even money not being made.

Mat is the assistant manager and Tamara the bar manager at Mix Ultra Lounge on Broadway. Their business produces a lot of empty bottles that they’d like to recycle, but they can’t find anyone to do it.

“Everybody preaches that we should recycle, but we can’t find anybody even interested in it,” Tamara said.

Mat would even like to see if there’s some possible revenue stream for the club in all the empties it produces, but so far he hasn’t found it.

“We throw away an ungodly amount of glass for a small business like ours,” Mat said. “I would like it to be recycled, but being a business, we would at least have to cover cost.

“It could also save us money in manpower and storage space. It would be great to have a profit, but the main purpose would be to recycle it and at least cover the cost of it.”

“We even thought about starting an anger management program,” Tamara joked. “You pay so much per bottle and you break bottles until you’re not angry anymore.”

But then you’d just have to sweep up the glass before tossing into the Dumpster.

Mat told me they go through about 500 liquor bottles and 800 beer bottles a month. That’s 1,300 bottles, and Mix is just one of about a dozen bars downtown. And some of the others plow through a lot more than 800 beer bottles a month, he said.

But even if Mix is average, that could be more than 15,000 bottles a month -- 180,000 a year -- coming out of just a few blocks of the downtown bar district. And there are a heck of a lot more bars and restaurants around town tossing bottles into the trash. And ultimately into landfills.

If three empties add up to a pound, that’s 60,000 pounds, 30 tons, of glass coming out of just a few blocks of downtown. And going into a landfill.

And guess what. Glass doesn’t decompose or rust or rot. It’ll be in that landfill pretty much forever. Tiger Woods will quit paying alimony before that glass goes away.

The good news from a Columbus perspective is that the glass from many if not most of the downtown bars, and many others, isn’t going into the Columbus landfill.

Veolia Environment has the contract to haul off much of the commercial trash in town, and they haul it to Taylor County.

They, too, would like to figure out a way to recycle the glass. After all, they’re paying for the gas to haul it a couple of counties away and then paying the per-ton charge to dump it in the dump.

But they can’t find anyone interested in taking it either. I spoke to Sandy Lampert over at Veolia. She said they recycle cardboard and are always looking for new markets to market other items, but at least in this part of the country, glass just isn’t a hot commodity.

“The Southeast just isn’t a good market,” she said. “You can go pick it up, but unless you have someone who’s going to buy it from you or take it, that’s going to be a problem.”

The city recycles on a residential basis, of course.

But the city’s recycling program just doesn’t have the capacity to handle the amount produced commercially. The good news is that the city is building a new recycling plant, and it will have a much larger capacity.

“The new recycling center will give us a greater opportunity to market that (recycling) service to businesses that want to get involved,” said Deputy City Manager David Arrington. “We could also partner with some of the local waste management companies. If they want to market recycling programs to their customers and let us do the processing, we can work with them on that.”

That sounds promising, but until either the city or some brilliant entrepreneur comes along to take the glass of their hands, Mat and Tamara will keep looking, and along with their counterparts in bars and restaurants all over town, keep tossing it all into the Dumpster.

Meanwhile, all that glass will be piling up in a pit in Taylor County, where archeologists will come upon it one day and say, “Wow. We’ve stumbled on a civilization of total sots.”

Update

Remember a while back when we reported on the 15-foot rock cliff out at the Northside Recreation Center baseball fields? Parks and Recreation director James Worsley said he was going to have a look at it and see if he thought it was a safety hazard.

I rode out there Saturday and there’s no railing or signs or anything to keep kids from hanging out on the cliff top.

Must be safe. Good to know.

See something around town that needs attention? Have a cold one, recycle the bottle and contact me at 706-571-8570 or mowen@ledger-enquirer.com.