Whenever folks from Alexandria want to point with pride to something in our city, the zoo usually is first. Justifiably.

Great churches dominate the downtown skyline. The hospitality and family atmosphere and the Rapides Symphony Orchestra usually get high marks, as do the airport, the Hotel Bentley and Kent House.

But listen up. There’s another up-and-coming place that is crashing the scene by its crushing. The Glass Act, now a full-crush glass recycling center on Leo Street, has a relatively new glass crushing machine — they got it in January — that puts Alexandria on America’s “cutting edge” of glass recycling. Pun intended.

At the center’s “Big Crush Celebration” for the public last Thursday,  Mike Bergeron, a retired local electrical engineer who’s one of the 200-plus volunteers who make things happen at the center, explained how the machine works. And he later told me there are only a handful of other places in the country that have a comparable machine. And those are at larger production facilities.

Let’s back up a minute and explain that the local glass recycling center is the brainchild of Annie Collins and other locals. She and Evelyn Jones and Trayce Snow birthed the idea of such a place in Annie’s living room some five years ago, and the big sliding door to the facility first opened about four years ago.

“Trayce carved out some by-laws and we made it happen,” Collins said at last week’s event. The idea was to collect glass, crush the glass and repurpose the glass, rather than have glass just collect in a landfill, where it would remain forever.

“Today,” said Collins, “we have collected 583,000 pounds of glass.”

This recycling project started with a portable glass crusher that took one bottle at a time. That, by no means, was going to sustain a serious recycling operation, so they got a bigger one – but still small compared to the new one showcased for all to see – and it was forever clogging up and shutting down, requiring time-consuming cleanouts. With people coming out of the woodwork to donate more and more glass, they needed something far bigger and more reliable.

Until this year, Glass Act would have to package the glass and send it to Sibelco, a major glass recycling outfit in Houston, which crushed it into sand. Glass Act would buy it back by the pallet and sell it to be used as either an abrasive, or for pool filtration or to be repurposed to make new glass products.

Again, acquiring a machine that could do that kind of thing on site was a big priority.

“When I made my pitch to Blake (Chatelain, president of Red River Bank), he told me we needed a business plan,” said Collins. “I don’t know about a ‘business plan,’ but all I can tell you is we get the glass, we crush the glass and repurpose the glass. He said, “Can you put that in writing?’”

Once the business plan was written and submitted, the wheels started turning to make the acquisition and purchase of such a glass crusher possible. Glass Act secured a Louisiana grant to pay for it. Such a machine, if new, would’ve cost $200,000, said Bergeron, but Glass Act bought one about three years old for $80,000.

The manufacturer was in New Zealand, and the distributor was in New York, and Glass Act retrieved one that had been donated to a glass recycling center in Scott near Lafayette. The machine has a 12’x30’ footprint and is about 12 feet tall and can crush two tons of glass per hour, said Bergeron. It needs 480 volts of electricity. By comparison, a typical American home needs 120 volts.

It had to be disassembled to transport its family of pieces on the back of a trailer to Alexandria, where it was reassembled.

“It looked like the Beverly Hillbillies were coming when it arrived,” Collins quipped.

Glass Act continues to also recycle beverage aluminum cans. It once had a contract with the city to recycle cardboard, but after the city dropped that contract, “nobody stepped up,” said Collins, noting a private cardboard recycler that briefly operated on the grounds didn’t last. But there are plans to soon recycle cardboard again, as soon as enough money is raised.

One of the “secret sauces” to making the recycling center work as well as it does, Collins said, is “no employees.” Rather than worry about wages and salaries and people not showing up for work, etc., Collins said, everyone at the center is a volunteer.

“Everyone,” she said, “shows up to work with a smile.”

It’s not a money-making project by any means, but considering its humble roots and how far it has progressed since it started, it’s looking like “The Little Engine (or the Bigger Engine) that Could.”