It began with a lament about the fate of empty beer and wine bottles.
In early 2020, Franziska Trautmann and Max Steitz, then seniors at Tulane University, were looking for ways to keep their glass out of the trash. Throughout its absorption, New Orleans did not offer curbside glass recycling. Almost all of the many bottles drained in the Crescent City ended up in landfills.
For Ms. Troutman and Mr. Steige, this was not just sad, but a missed opportunity. The city’s wetlands were eroding quickly and glass could turn to sand. What if they collected glass in the city, crushed it into sand and put it to good use?
Buoyed by the optimism of youth and enthusiastic crowdfunding, they bought a small glass pulverizer and set it up in the backyard of a welcoming local fraternity, Zeta Psi. Almost immediately the drop barrels overflowed. “We underestimated how much demand there was,” said the 27-year-old Mr. Steitz.
Now, four years later, their company, Glass Half Full, is the only glass recycling facility in New Orleans. It has become the founders’ full-time job, employs a staff of 15, and has expanded far beyond what they imagined.
To date, their operation has crushed seven million pounds of glass that has been used in disaster relief sandbags, terrazzo flooring, landscaping, wetlands restoration and research. They offer pickups near New Orleans and Baton Rouge and recently opened a small location in Birmingham, Ala. The company is set to move to a new three-acre site in St. Bernard Parish after raising $4.5 million to build and equip the new location, which they will rent.
Glass Half Full’s revenue last year was $1 million, according to Ms. Trautmann, 26, who said the venture has been quiet.
Profitability in glass recycling depends on the quality, proximity to a recycling facility and how the glass containers are collected. Glass collected with paper, plastics and other recyclables becomes contaminated and difficult to sort, reducing its value, said Scott DeFife, president of the Glass Packaging Institute, a trade association. So while glass can be endlessly recycled, it often isn’t.
“The people at Glass Half Full are doing yeoman’s work down there,” Mr. DeFife said. But, he added, the reason they had to exist was indicative of “the broken waste management system in this country”.
In many ways, Glass Half Full tests whether it can resolve a mismatch.
About one-third of the glass thrown away in the United States is recycled, while recycling rates in New Orleans it is among the lowest in the country. At the same time, sand, which is vital for construction, is in increasing demand around the world. The United Nations has warned of a looming shortage. But excavating sand is often harmful to the environment and its weight makes it expensive to transport.
In Louisiana, where wetlands are disappearing at an average rate of a football field every 100 minutes, the state needs millions of cubic yards of material to rebuild its shorelines. However, river dredging and damming of the Mississippi River keeps this sediment could otherwise be used for wetland restoration to distant states, too expensive to ship.
Glass Half Full’s work is still small and the coastal restoration work is still very much in the exploratory stage. But its founders say pulverizing bottles in New Orleans and using the sand for local projects could help reduce environmental damage and the costs of dredging and shipping, while diverting glass from landfills. It’s a win, win, win proposition, Ms. Trautmann and Mr. Steitz say.
“Another person in the offshore industry called it a ‘pop-up quarry,'” Ms. Troutman said. “We can create sediment in the city, which is normally not possible.”
At Tulane, Ms. Trautmann, who is from rural Louisiana, studied chemical engineering. Mr. Steige grew up in Manhattan and Brooklyn and majored in international development after spending a gap year in Greece volunteering with refugees. With another Tulane student, Max Landy, they started a non-profit in 2019 called Plant the Peace, which raised money to plant trees.
Mr. Steitz, dismayed by the lack of local recycling options, thought they should branch out into glass recycling. At the time, New Orleans only accepted glass from residents once a month and had a cap of 50 pounds per person.
The group hadn’t fully researched whether the powdered glass could be used to restore wetlands, but pressed ahead and announced the fundraising plan on social media, where it caught fire.
The project was uneventful and driven by a do-it-yourself ethos. They couldn’t afford dumpsters, let alone wheelie bins, so Ms. Trautmann found cheap, used 55-gallon barrels that they placed, with permission, at a few churches, a pizza shop and Mr. Steitz’s front yard.
They saved enough to buy their first glass breaker for a few thousand dollars and soon discovered how smelly, messy and loud the work was. At one point even the fraternity brothers complained, albeit in the last week. The police were also called, although the officers ended up telling the students to go on, Ms Trautmann said.
The venture made the local news and their disposal sites were quickly overrun. They raised funds for more glass crushers and moved into a small workshop, which, Mr. Steitz said, “we outgrew by day two.” Aided by more crowdfunding and a growing group of volunteers, they moved into a 40,000 square foot warehouse in August 2020.
Their first batches went into flood sandbags, which they paid for at a suggested donation of $5 each. A local terrazzo manufacturer wanted crushed blue glass, so they began sorting their bottles by color and selling them to local landscapers. They also sell glass sand and gravel on their website.
Along with selling their glassware and hosting regular fundraisers (one was called ‘Glasstonbury’) they also began offering home and commercial glass collections for a fee. They’ve expanded curbside pickup to Baton Rouge and more recently to Birmingham, where they plan to sell cullet, shards of waste glass that can be remelted, for glassmaking and perhaps fiberglass production.
“Part of the puzzle is creating demand,” Mr. Steitz said. “With any of these we need massive volume.”
Their first business client was Snake and Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge, a messy, bright dive bar near the Tulane campus.
“It drives me crazy how everyone’s having a great time partying down here and throwing trash like it’s nothing,” said bar owner Dave Clements, a self-proclaimed old hippie who pays $165 a half pint a month to pick up the trash. of his bar. . “They have good intentions,” he added. “And I think it helps.”
In 2021, the research at the heart of their work began, analyzing whether their glass was safe for the environment. Julie Albert, an associate professor in Tulane’s department of chemical and biomolecular engineering, led a team that found the company’s glass sand and gravel to be clean, with low levels of lead and other contaminants. In greenhouse experiments, they found that native plants grew well in the glassy sand and that it did not kill the fish or crabs or damage their soft tissues. The project was was awarded $5 million from the National Science Foundation to expand the research, and the team is in the process of publishing their findings.
After determining that the product is ecologically safe, Glass Half Full placed a demonstration project on Pointe-au-Chien tribal land, building a rain garden, glass gravel and garden beds. They provided 100,000 pounds of sand in biodegradable burlap bags to build berms at the Big Branch Marsh National Wildlife Refuge on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, where storms and winds have caused saltwater to intrude into fresh water.
However, there is skepticism about how effectively glass sand and sediment can restore wetlands or beaches.
James Karst, a spokesman for the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, a nonprofit group that has worked with Glass Half Full on several projects, pointed to the range of problems facing coastal Louisiana: land subsidence, sea level rise, river levees and natural wetlands long before logging and the fossil fuel industry.
“Our problems are huge here, and putting more sand in our coastal wetlands is not going to solve all of our problems,” he said.
He also said that while material dredging operations are used to remediate small targeted sites, the focus of Glass Half Full operations, it is expensive, not sustainable for land reconstruction and does not last. Effective restoration of the land must include reconnecting the river with wetlands, he said, an effort that is ongoing.
In an email, Ms. Trautmann said the company did not see its product as a panacea, but rather “a small part of the solution to solving the coastal erosion crisis.”
He noted that the glass they recycled would otherwise have ended up in a landfill and that, most importantly, the company was calling on locals to help the struggling wetlands.
“The more people we can get involved and passionate about this issue,” he said, “the better off we’re going to be.”