For many of the recycling-minded among us, the sound of glass bottles plinking to the bottom of the trash can provokes a string of nagging thoughts: This feels wrong. Why must we send a recyclable product to the landfill? Why can't Anchorage figure it out when the rest of the nation seems to have been on board for years?

It comes down to simple economics.

For the time being, those who can't bring themselves to drop glass bottles and jars into the dumpster -- be they from sauces, juices, baby food, wine or beer -- don't have many options. Either you give in and it's off to the garbage they go, or else, hopeful recycling will be reborn, you create ever-growing stashes of glass, putting yourself at risk of becoming a candidate for the A&E cable show "Hoarders."

And while glass still appears to still be recycled in large containers on Elmendorf Air Force Base, the appearance is misleading. The large drop-off containers located on base are collected by Alaska Waste, a waste and recycling service in Anchorage, which confirmed that, like the municipality, it stopped recycling glass last January. Any glass collected by the company is thrown out.

For now, recyclers in search of creative solutions may find it difficult to turn their unwanted treasures into someone else's problem.

"The day after they stopped recycling we started getting people in asking if they could take our glass into our shop," said Lisa Peltola of Arctic Brewing Supply. The small shop, which caters to home brewers of wine and beer, used to take in clean bottles and pass them on to its customers, but in the last year it has become so overwhelmed with glass deposits that Peltola now has a sign up to let people know the store no longer takes bottles.

"We got mounds," she said, describing how a man once dropped of 30 cases of beer bottles in a single trip, and adding that she still gets weekly calls from people desperate to take their glass anywhere but the dump. "It's really sad."

Crafters with kilns can melt glass down into colorful cheese plates, coasters, dinner plates and other housewares, but several artists selling at recent holiday fairs said they have more than enough glass coming in to meet their needs. People with patience can also turn their old wine bottles into drinking glasses, but that, too, has its production limits.

One year after suspending glass recycling, the city is hopeful old bottles can be reincarnated as craft and art glass, along with aggregate, a gravel-like material used in road projects.

Anchorage residents were diverting 1,500 tons of glass per year from the waste stream before the municipality stopped recycling, which amounts to one-tenth of the amount of glass that could be recycled if recent estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency are correct, according to city recycling coordinator Donna Mears. But capturing it effectively has its challenges -- a problem not just for Anchorage but also felt in many communities nationwide, Mears said.

In terms of economics, glass recycling isn't overly attractive. The raw material needed to make new glass -- sand -- is readily available and inexpensive, unlike the mining operations required to extract metals like aluminum and steel for cans, Mears said. Plus, there's a negative environmental impact. Shipping and reprocessing glass can take more fuel than making new glass using virgin material, she said.

And whatever end product results, there must be a big enough appetite from buyers to make the time and money invested in glass recycling to be worth the effort.

Ideally, that means coupling a "hungry beast" like the road construction industry, which can take a high volume of low-cost product, with a more refined end user, like buyers for glass tiles or art glass, which may be lower in quantity but will sell at a premium, Mears said.

A lopsided business model is what sunk the city's last glass contractor, E.K. Industries. Although it sold sandblasting glass to the Seward shipyard, it had far more glass coming in than it could handle, and ultimately abandoned the operation.