New Orleans NFPO, Glass Half Full is Piecing Together a Business Opportunity, One Glass Bottle at a Time

Co founders Max Steitz and Franziska Trautmann

Glass Half Full: Recycling glass into sand for disaster relief and coastal restoration

Going green!!

People may open a wine bottle to celebrate a work win. But for co-founders and recent Tulane University graduates Franziska Trautmann and Max Steitz, a shared bottle of wine sparked an entirely new business concept, aptly named Glass Half Full.

The two were frustrated that the bottle of wine they were enjoying one night could not be easily recycled anywhere in the city of New Orleans. In fact, the closest glass recycling center was hundreds of miles away. So, the two decided to take matters into their own hands…and in turn are rethinking the entire life cycle of glass bottles.

“We were a bit fed up that we couldn’t recycle our glass, that all of the wine bottles we were drinking were going to a landfill and so we decided to do something about it,” said Trautmann, vicariously crediting the fruit of the vine for assisting in their ingenuity.

She then added a beach restoration angle to the Glass Half Full endeavor. “I always heard growing up that we lose a football field’s length of land every 100 minutes and that’s daunting. So, we thought if we could turn this glass into sand and then rebuild our coast, that would be the ultimate win-win.”

The problem they are solving in New Orleans is two-fold. Residents don’t have an easy way to recycle glass and the city as a whole is constantly fighting coastal erosion challenges. Glass Half Full addresses both of these with its collection services and recycling facility.

On the consumer side, New Orleans residents, restaurants, and businesses sign up to join a bottle pick-up program or drop off empty bottles at their facilities. Glass is loaded onto a large conveyor belt where it is crushed and turned back into cullets, sand, and other needed products.

“It ranges from a very fine powder, like sand, all the way up to gravel-sized material. And the size will determine what we use it for,” Trautmann said. The finer powder is good for sandblasting, disaster relief efforts, and coastal restoration projects because of its absorbent nature. The gravel is better used in landscaping, water management, and cooling project, Trautmann added.

Here are a couple of questions to ask her about Glass Half Full and beyond.

Talk about the connection between glass recycling and the fight against climate change.

Glass can take up to one million years to decompose in a landfill. In the United States, we are dooming billions of pounds of glass to landfills where it will not decompose or turn into anything useful, while at the same time we are losing land at an alarming rate and running out of sand globally. If we could instead divert glass from landfills, turn it into sand, and use that sand for construction or coastal restoration, then we should! We should never doom valuable resources to a landfill when they could be used to combat climate change.

What does the phrase “climate emergency,” mean to you?

A Climate emergency means that we do not have time to wait to take action. Every single person can do something to help combat the emergency we are in.

What is your advice to young people who want to get involved in climate activism?

How Sand Made From Crushed Glass Rebuilds Louisiana’s Shrinking Coast | World Wide Waste

My advice to young people is to JUST DO IT! Really. I started GHF without any recycling or waste management knowledge. I truly did not know anything about glass or sand or coastal restoration. I knew that I wanted to tackle this issue and I was very passionate about it. So many of us get bogged down in the “what ifs” or the stuff we don’t know, but it is so important to focus on what you do know and what you want to do. That’s why I named our organization Glass Half Full ? It is easy to fall into climate doomism or focus on the negatives and feel as though you cannot do anything, but the more we focus on the positives and what we CAN do the more we actually get done!

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