It Got Easy Beer-ing Green: Nashville Mayor Pushes Honky-Tonks To Recycle

NASHVILLE, TN — Downtown Nashville generates 6,000 tons of trash annually and, today, it all heads to landfills, but starting in January, Metro Mayor Megan Barry wants to slash that number by tackling an item that's nearly as synonymous with Lower Broadway as neon lights, tourists in boots and wooing bachelorettes: glass bottles.

The bars of Broadway's neon canyon throw out massive amounts of glass beer and liquor bottles, the detritus of the district's seven-days-a-week Saturday night. When the ball — or in Nashville's case, the music note — drops on 2018, Barry wants the bars to separate the bottles from the rest of their garbage so they can be recycled.

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"Nashville is synonymous with the long neck bottle. The volume that's coming out of Lower Broad, particularly as Nashville becomes more known around the country and around the world, is something we need to address," Mary Beth Ikard, the mayor's sustainability manager, told WSMV. "Shortly after coming into office, Mayor Barry took a late night tour of downtown with our public works crew and noticed just how much glass they were hauling out in trucks to be disposed in a landfill."

Extra staff, trucks and carts put the price tag of initiative at $400,000.

Nearly a decade ago, Barry's predecessor Karl Dean launched an initiative to make Nashville the greenest city in the South, an effort Barry continued with a 35-member Livable Nashville Committee, charged with creating a Metro-wide green strategy. Last month, she announced the launch of a conservation fund to preserve open spaces and key natural resources in the city.

Photo by J.R. Lind, Patch staff