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, in New Orleans, were spitballing ways to keep their glass out of the trash. For all of its imbibing, the city didn’t offer curbside glass recycling. Pretty much all of the many bottles drained in the Crescent City ended up in landfills.

For Trautmann and 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,” said Steitz, 27.

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 7 million of pounds of glass that has been used in disaster-relief sandbags, terrazzo flooring, landscaping, wetland restoration and research. It offers curbside pickups in New Orleans and Baton Rouge and recently opened a small facility in Birmingham, Alabama. The company is poised to move to a new 3-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 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, although glass can be endlessly recycled, it often isn’t.

“The folks at Glass Half Full are doing yeoman’s work down there,” DeFife said. But, he added, the reason they had to exist was indicative of “the broken system of waste management in this country.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .