New Orleans Likes to Drink. They Spotted a Huge Recycling Opportunity

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…