Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: September 4, 2024
Recycling glass to reduce erosion!
A company in Louisiana is pulverizing glass bottles to form a fine sand that can be used for coastal restoration and erosion control.
Tell your state leaders to check out this cool idea!
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Reasons For Hope
Founded by two college students in 2020, scrappy startup Glass Half Full has become the only glass recycling company in New Orleans, Louisiana - and they’re helping build climate resilience along the way. Glass Half Full collects glass bottles and other used glassware from businesses, then grinds it into a fine sand which can be used for coastal restoration, whether filling erosion-control sandbags or directly used in wetland restoration projects. An NSF-funded research project found that local plants can grow in the newly milled sand and that it doesn’t harm fish or crabs.
Impressively, this model seems scalable: Glass Half Full is breaking even and expanding their coverage area, they’ve processed seven million pounds of glass in their four years of existence, and they’re just getting started, with plans to build a new facility that will be able to process 300,000 pounds of glass a day. As The New York Times notes, they might just have found a way to solve a glaring mismatch: only about a third of U.S. glass waste is recycled, while sand is in ever-higher demand around the world for construction, restoration, erosion control, and disaster relief projects.
This is a really interesting and novel proof of concept, and we here at Climate Action Now think it deserves to be better known, especially by state and municipal policymakers with authority over waste management programs. We could really use to spread the example of a win-win program that recycles glass waste while creating a local source of sand for restoration and flood control efforts!
Tell your state leaders to promote “glass recycling for erosion control” trials in your state!
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This is great!