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.
