It started with a lament over the fate of empty beer and wine bottles.
In early 2020, Franziska Trautmann and Max Steitz, then seniors at Tulane University, were spitballing ways to keep their glass out of the trash. For all of its imbibing, New Orleans didn’t offer curbside glass recycling. Pretty much all of the many bottles drained in the Crescent City ended up in landfills.
For Ms. Trautmann and Mr. Steitz, this wasn’t just galling, but a missed opportunity. The city’s wetlands were fast eroding, and glass could be ground up into sand. What if they collected glass around town, 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 put it in the backyard of an accommodating local fraternity, Zeta Psi. Almost immediately, their drop-off barrels overflowed. “We underestimated how much demand there was,” Mr. Steitz, 27, said.
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 work, employs a staff of 15 and has expanded far beyond what they imagined.
To date, their operation has crushed seven millions of pounds of glass that’s been used in disaster-relief sandbags, terrazzo flooring, landscaping, wetland restoration and research. They offer curbside pickups in New Orleans and Baton Rouge and recently opened a small facility in Birmingham, Ala. The company is poised to move to a new three-acre site in St. Bernard Parish after raising $4.5 million to build out and equip the new location, which they will rent.
Glass Half Full’s revenues last year were $1 million, according to Ms. Trautmann, 26, who said the venture was breaking even.
Profitability in glass recycling depends on quality, proximity to a recycling facility and how glass containers are collected. Glass that is gathered with paper, plastic and other recyclables becomes contaminated and difficult to sort, driving down 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 folks 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 system of waste management in this country.”
In many ways, Glass Half Full is testing whether it can solve a mismatch.
About a third of glass thrown out in the United States is recycled, while recycling rates in New Orleans are among the lowest in the country. At the same time, sand, which is crucial for construction, is in growing demand around the world. The United Nations has warned of a looming shortage. But excavating sand is often environmentally damaging and its weight makes it expensive to transport.
In Louisiana, where wetlands have been vanishing at an average rate of a football field every 100 minutes, the state needs millions of cubic meters of material to rebuild its coast. Yet upriver dredging and damming of the Mississippi River keeps sediment that could otherwise be used for wetland restoration in faraway states, too expensive to ship.
Glass Half Full’s operations are still small, and its coastal restoration work is still largely in the research stage. But its founders say that pulverizing bottles in New Orleans and using the sand for local projects could help lessen the environmental damage and expense of dredging and shipping, while at the same time diverting glass from landfills. It’s a win, win, win proposition, Ms. Trautmann and Mr. Steitz say.
“Another person in the coastal industry called this a ‘pop-up quarry,’” Ms. Trautmann said. “We can generate sediment in the city, which usually isn’t possible.”
At Tulane, Ms. Trautmann, who is from rural Louisiana, studied chemical engineering. Mr. Steitz 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 nonprofit in 2019 called Plant the Peace, which raised money to plant trees.
Mr. Steitz, appalled at the paucity of local recycling options, thought they should branch out into recycling glass. At the time, New Orleans was accepting glass from residents just once a month and had a cap of 50 pounds per person.
The group hadn’t fully researched whether pulverized glass could be used to restore wetlands, but still forged ahead and announced its fund-raising plan on social media, where it caught fire.
The project was scrappy and driven by a do-it-yourself ethos. They couldn’t afford trash cans, let alone recycling bins with wheels, so Ms. Trautmann found cheap, used 55-gallon barrels that they placed, with permission, at a few churches, a pizza shop and in Mr. Steitz’s front yard.
They raised enough to buy their first glass crusher 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 during finals week. The police were also called, though officers ended up telling the students to carry on, Ms. Trautmann said.
The venture made the local news, and their drop-off sites were quickly overwhelmed. They raised funds for more glass crushers and moved to a small workshop, which, Mr. Steitz said, “we outgrew on Day Two.” Helped by more crowdfunding and a growing team of volunteers, they relocated to a 40,000-square-foot warehouse in August 2020.
Their early batches went into sandbags for flooding, which they doled out for a suggested donation of $5 apiece. A local terrazzo maker wanted crushed blue glass, so they began sorting their bottles by color and selling to local landscapers. They also sell glass sand and gravel on their website.
Along with selling their glass products, and regularly hosting fund-raisers (one was named “Glasstonbury”) they also started offering residential and commercial glass collection for a fee. They expanded curbside pickup to Baton Rouge and most recently Birmingham, where they plan to sell the cullet, scraps of waste glass that can be remelted, for glass manufacturing and perhaps fiberglass production.
“Part of the puzzle is building up demand,” Mr. Steitz said. “With any of these we need tremendous volume.”
Their first business customer was Snake and Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge, a ramshackle, light-festooned dive bar close to the Tulane campus.
“It drives me crazy how everybody’s having a great time partying down here and throwing trash away like it’s nothing,” said the bar’s owner, Dave Clements, a self-described old hippie who pays Glass Half Full $165 a month to collect his bar’s castoffs. “They’re well intentioned,” he added. “And I think it’s helping.”
In 2021, research began into the heart of their work, 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 was clean, with low levels of lead and other contaminants. In greenhouse experiments, they found that native plants grew well in the glass sand and that it didn’t kill fish or crabs or damage their soft tissues. The project 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 the product was determined to be ecologically safe, Glass Half Full installed a demonstration project on Pointe-au-Chien tribal land, building a rain garden, a glass gravel drain and garden beds. They supplied 100,000 pounds of sand in biodegradable burlap bags to build berms at Big Branch Marsh National Wildlife Refuge on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, where storm surges and winds have caused saltwater to intrude in freshwater.
Still, 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 raft of problems coastal Louisiana faces: sinking earth, rising sea levels, river levees and natural wetlands long ago carved up by logging and the fossil fuel industry.
“Our problems are tremendous here, and putting more sand into our coastal wetlands is not going to solve all of our problems,” he said.
He also said that while using dredged material works for restoring small targeted sites, a focus of Glass Half Full’s work, it’s expensive, not sustainable for rebuilding land and does not last. Effective land restoration has to include reconnecting the river to wetlands, he said, an effort currently underway.
In an email Ms. Trautmann said the company didn’t view its product as a panacea but rather “one small part of the solution to solving our coastal erosion crisis.”
She noted that the glass they recycled would otherwise end up in the landfill and that, crucially, the company was getting local residents to help struggling wetlands.
“The more people we can get involved and passionate about this topic,” she said, “the better off we will be.”