If you're one of these people who carefully sorts what you recycle, your efforts may be for naught.
Officials are scrambling to find ways to use all the glass we put in our recycling bins, but they are running out of options.
That’s because there is virtually no market to sell Quebec's recycled glass, and so much of it ends up in landfills.
Glass gets sorted out of our recycle, but there's nobody to buy it since the main glass recycling company closed last year.
Jerome Normand, the director-general of Enivronnement Jeunesse, an environmental group, says the Societe des alcools du Quebec (SAQ) is part of the problem because it doesn't offer refunds for its empty bottles.
Liquor boards in eight other provinces offer those rebates.
Normand says the problem starts with the colour of the glass we recycle. When the clear, brown and green bottles are mixed together, the product that results is impure.
He says a refund program by the SAQ and other retailers would encourage people not to put their bottles in their recycling bins, but take them back to the stores.
The product that results would be much easier to sell, he said.
A spokeswoman from the SAQ told CTV it thinks the current system works just fine.
But a union rep for its workers says the crown corporation should take the lead.
“The SAQ must be a leader for the environmental, and about the glass, they got to show an example,” said Michel Morency.
The government agency in charge of recycling says 65 per cent of recycled glass is now being used for things like lining roads in landfills, a “temporary solution,” says its president and director general.
Benoit de Villiers says the agency is studying whether to extend bottle refunds.
