25/03/2023
Posted • Most ideas that start over a bottle of wine don’t go anywhere, but this one is different.
Franziska Trautmann and Max Steitz were drinking from a type of glass bottles one night a few years ago when they decided they would start collecting bottles from fellow Tulane University students and friends for recycling. “We decided to be a part of the solution,” Trautmann says. Soon, they had a mountain of bottles in their backyard and were buying a machine to pulverize glass into sand.
Today, Steitz and Trautmann, both 25 years old, are recycling about 100,000 pounds of glass every month in a 40,000-square-foot facility at .nola. So far, they have diverted 3.2 million pounds of glass from landfills with just eight employees.
The company has 12 collection containers throughout the city of New Orleans. They only ask locals to clean the glass of food scraps before tossing them in; they don’t need to remove labels and caps, “because the machine is able to separate the caps from the glass,” Trautmann explains.
The glass-sand is then used for everything from jewelry to landscaping. But the most urgent repurposing is for Louisiana’s shrinking coastline. So far, Glass Half Full has recycled 20 tons of glass each for two wetland restoration projects.
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