Glass is infinitely recyclable, so it’s easy to imagine that all those bottles and jars you put out at the curb every week are headed off to be melted down and remade — baby-food jars into baby-food jars, beer bottles into beer bottles, forever and ever, amen. But as Melanie Asmar reported in June 2015, the glass that residents put in their purple bins along with other alleged recyclables was reused only once — as a liner for landfills — in cities like Denver, which adopted single-stream recycling back in 2005.

But now that's changing. The city has been replacing dumpsters and those big purple bins — much to the dismay of some residents — and Momentum Recycling is about to open a long-planned facility that will be able to recycle bits of glass into something useful.