Jeannine Warren is doing more than her part to “reduce, reuse and recycle.”

She’s got at least five tons of green, brown and clear class pebbles atop a weed barrier with flower beds surrounding her central Kentucky home. The pebbles come from recycled glass containers. She’s a beneficiary of efforts by a few Kentucky counties that are crushing old glass to make the rounded pebbles or sand for flashy landscaping or road-bed construction.

“It sparkles in the sun,” the Washington County woman told The Courier-Journal. “It sparkles in the snow and rain. It reflects in the light if you have lights in your garden. It looks really nice.”

More than half of Kentucky’s 120 counties don’t accept any glass for recycling, according to state records. In Jefferson County, the state’s most populous, the volume of recycled glass makes it economical to have it processed into new glass containers and other products.

“We’d like to see glass introduced back into the recycling stream for all Kentucky counties,” said Sara D. Evans, manager of the recycling branch of the Kentucky Division of Waste Management.

State and local recycling officials are working to come up with new ways to keep old beverage bottles from filling landfills. A growing number of waste haulers either won’t collect them or will do it only if they can charge hefty transportation fees that some local governments say they can’t afford.

Some counties, such as Franklin, Woodford and Scott, have stopped collecting glass at the curb, Evans said, but residents can still take them to recycling collection sites.

Glass is relatively heavy, making it expensive to move to recycling businesses, and there are fewer glass bottles to bring as plastic beverage containers become more popular.

To try to get counties to bring back glass recycling, the waste management division is lending a pulverizing machine to counties to help local officials decide whether they want to purchase one, Evans said.

The machine, which costs between $10,000 and $20,000, yields a product that competes well against gravel used to underlay road beds, with no sharp shards or jagged edges, said Tom Heil, a coordinator for the Kentucky recycling and local assistance program.

“It gives the counties an opportunity to produce pulverized glass and shop it around,” he said.

Warren’s glass for her yard was produced by the pulverizing machine while it was on loan earlier this year to Washington County.

George Ann Palmer, Washington County’s solid-waste coordinator, said she was going to have to send glass to a landfill, but she’s pleased Warren and several others were willing to experiment with the product as a landscaping material.

Palmer is also weighing other potential uses for pulverized glass.

Last month, Boyle County recycling officials tested the same machine.

Boyle residents currently drop off about 400 pounds of glass bottles at recycling stations each day, and for now they are sent to a company that is experimenting with using glass as part of concrete for building foundation pads, said Donna Fechter, the county’s solid-waste coordinator.

Ben Pedigo, a recycling regional sales manager for Rumpke, which has a recycling center in Louisville, said his company can turn a profit from collecting glass because of the amount it gets in a larger community.

Lexington has a glass-pulverizing machine, but most of the crushed glass goes to a local landfill, where it is used as road-bed material and for covering sections of the dump as they fill.

But Penny McFadden, Fayette County’s solid-waste coordinator, said the product is a legitimate substitute for other construction products, such as gravel.

Lexington police also use it instead of sand behind targets at a shooting range, she said.

In Western Kentucky, Henderson, Webster and Union counties have used several hundred tons of crushed glass from their recycling programs as road-bed material or backfill for culverts since 2003.

“It’s stronger and more porous” than crushed rock, the industry standard, said Pauline Allen, the three counties’ recycling and solid-waste coordinator.

Using it in construction saves $90 a ton on other materials, in addition to the savings realized from not sending the bottles to a landfill.

“As a recycling coordinator, I don’t want to pull back,” Allen said. “We had to take a leap out there. But it’s also not rocket science.”[.