Beginning this summer, glass plunked in blue boxes across the GTA will head to a new facility on Van Kirk Drive, where it will be converted into bottles and fiberglass insulation.

Right now, a lot of the glass collected is shipped south of the border and ground up for use in roadbeds.

And although the current arrangement has its environmental benefits, the cost to haul the material away usually means municipalities come up on the losing end economically.

The new deal will see Peel Region save about $40 a tonne in shipping, said Peel's director of waste Andy Pollock.

"Most of the glass that comes out of recycling plants is broken and is mixed coloured glass. The markets for that, up until now, have been very limited," said Pollock noting Peel currently pays a company in New York State to take its mixed glass. "Our material is marketed as aggregate material and used for roadbeds and things like that. That's a low value application and so, to pay to transport it to market, there is actually a negative market value."

The Brampton plant, built by Montreal's Unical Inc., will service Toronto, Hamilton, York, Durham and Peel regions.

Collectively, municipalities figure they'll save big bucks over the next seven years.

More than 43,000 tonnes of glass -10,000 tonnes from Peel- will be diverted to Brampton, saving transportation costs and hassles at the border.

Pollock said region officials estimate Peel Region will pocket between $220,000 and $270,000 per year.

"This will save us a lot of money," Pollock said. "The plant in Brampton will take that mixed broken glass, clean it up and turn it into a higher value added feedstock for things like fibre glass production. There will still be a small cost to municipalities, at least in the early years to deliver it to Unical, but at much lower cost than delivering it to aggregate producers."

Unical will dole out $10 million to build the new plant.

A further $1.75 million will be provided by Stewardship Ontario, an agency funded by industries that produce packaged and printed material, for processing equipment.

Processing recycled glass requires less energy and produces less air pollution than making new glass.

Andre Racine, Unical president, said the business model works because the material doesn't have to be transported far distances.

Also, because the mixed glass is being converted to high-grade products such as fiberglass, the company is able to charge municipalities less to process it.

The program will service the GTA initially, but Stewardship Ontario aims to process all the glass collected from the provincial blue box collection program.

"In fact, when this plant is fully operational, it will have capacity to process much more glass than these initial 44,000 tonnes," Racine said. "We're expecting we'll make rapid progress toward our capacity of 120,000 tonnes because we'll be almost next door to many municipalities that generate a lot of blue box mixed glass. That will save on transportation costs alone."

Stewardship Ontario estimates the investment in the Unical plant will be paid back in less than two years.

Each of the five municipal partners in the deal stands to save operating costs totaling about $10 million over the life of the contract.