Judy Woodruff:
Franziska Trautmann is the founder and CEO of Glass Half Full, a recycling company that converts glass into sand for coastal restoration projects and disaster relief.
Tonight, she shares her Brief But Spectacular take on what she calls glassroots recycling.
Franziska Trautmann, Founder and CEO, Glass Half Full: When you throw something away, where is away?
This is something that we often like to ask people at Glass Half Full, because I think, as a society, we have really lost touch with understanding where our waste is going. Do you know if it’s actually being recycled? And, if so, what is it being turned into? And where does it go after that?
I grew up in a sort of rural part of Louisiana. It’s called Carencro. It’s a very small town. And we still don’t have curbside recycling where I grew up. Moving to New Orleans, I sort of thought things might be a little bit better, since it’s a bigger city, they have a bit more resources. But that was not the case.
Turning the frustration that we had into action ultimately happened over a bottle of wine one night that we knew would end up in the landfill. And the more we thought about how our waste and our actions were contributing to this issue, the more fired up we got about making a change and making something happen, because we no longer wanted to be a part of the problem. We wanted to be a part of the solution.
Glass Half Full started in the spring of 2020, while my co-founder and I were still seniors at Tulane University. Because of my chemical engineering background, I did know that glass came from sand. And so I knew that there must be a way to turn glass back into sand, which there is. Sand is a resource that could be utilized in this city.
We use it for disaster relief, coastal restoration, construction, landscaping, flooring. And now, instead of glass going to the landfill, we’re able to turn it into a usable product that benefits our community. And we now recycle over 100,000 pounds of glass every single month.
The main way we were able to start is just by starting small. And then we learned along the way. And we grew step by step from that small backyard into now a 40,000-square-foot facility.
So, once we collect the glass and it reaches our facility, we will put it into what we like to call Glass Mountain. And, from there, we will pick it up with a front-end loader that can load our pulverizing machine. And we’re left with a pretty clean sand product that we can then sift into different sizes. Each size has a different utilization.
And so, like, the finest sand is really good for sandbags. The core sand is what we’re using for coastal restoration and protection projects. If we just keep sending trash to the landfill, where it’s never going to decompose, it’s never going to do any good, that’s getting us nowhere, whereas, if we’re able to turn all of that waste into a resource that can then fight our coastal erosion issues and protect our coasts, which is eroding at an alarming rate, then it feels like a no-brainer.
My name is Franziska Trautmann, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on glassroots recycling.
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