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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/recycled-glass-turned-into-sand-is-restoring-louisianas-shrinking-coastline/>
"Most ideas that start over a bottle of wine don’t go anywhere, but this one is
different. Two Tulane University seniors in New Orleans, Franziska Trautmann
and Max Steitz, were drinking wine in their dorm when they started lamenting
the fact that the bottle would end up in landfill after they threw it in the
trash. Trautmann, whose father immigrated to the US from rural Germany before
she was born, had visited his home country and observed that Germany had a
nationwide glass recycling program. Louisiana didn’t.
“So we decided to be a part of the solution,” Trautmann says matter-of-factly
via Zoom from her office in New Orleans.
With the moxie of youth, they simply started collecting glass bottles from
fellow students and friends. After a local paper reported on their mission, the
heaps of glass in their backyard grew so fast that they soon crowdfunded
$18,000 for a professional machine to pulverize glass into sand. “That’s when
we got really fired up,” Trautmann says, “because people obviously cared about
this.”
Fast forward from their humble start in February 2020 to today, Steitz and
Trautmann, both 25 years old, recycle about 100,000 pounds of glass every month
at Glass Half Full Nola, a low-profit limited liability company whose primary
purpose is to achieve a social benefit. So far, they have diverted 3.2 million
pounds of glass from landfills with just eight employees.
They no longer collect the glass in their backyard, but have moved into a
professional 40,000-square-foot facility in August 2020, with its own
processing systems, forklifts and containers where the glass is sorted into
different colors. Cooperating with a local glass blower and a jewelry designer,
Andrew Barrows and Travis Laurendine, they started a jewelry shop, Nola
Alchemy, that shows off the beauty of recycled glass that has been crafted into
amulets and beads. “We’re essentially turning trash into treasures,” Trautmann
says."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
