Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode "How taking a second look can change your everything"
In 2020, Franziska Trautmann and her boyfriend, Max Steitz, had just polished off a bottle of cheap wine when a disturbing thought struck them.
"We were like, 'Hold on — this bottle is going to end up in a landfill' because Louisiana had virtually no glass recycling," Trautmann recently told NPR's Manoush Zomorodi.
In New Orleans, where Trautmann was studying chemical engineering at the time, curbside recycling existed — but didn't take glass bottles. The same was true throughout much of Louisiana.
So Trautmann turned to Google to figure out what to do.
The nearest facility that could process glass for recycling appeared to be in Texas.
"We did some small, back-of-the-napkin math on that and realized that would never work economically," Trautmann said.
The only feasible solution would be to figure out how to process glass themselves.
From sand to glass … to sand again
With a little more research, Trautmann and Steitz discovered a machine that could turn glass into its original form: sand.
So they raised money to buy their first glass-crushing machine and set up shop in a fraternity house. They put collection bins around the city so people could drop off old glass bottles. Then, they recruited some friends and got to work.
"We have some music bumpin', and some people are sorting through the glass and people are taking caps off. There's one person crushing, and the rest of us are, like, hand-sifting the material," said Trautmann. "And basically, we did that until nighttime and then went home, went to bed and did it again."
Restoring Louisiana's coastline
Once they made sand, the team had to figure out a use for it.
Trautmann had fond childhood memories of playing in Louisiana's bayous, but for years she saw the coastline in crisis.
The U.S. Geological Survey has found that Louisiana lost the equivalent of a football field's worth of land every every 34 to 100 minutes from 1932 to 2016, based on varying land-loss rates over that time span.
"In my lifetime so far, we've lost over 600 square miles. That's more area than New York City, San Francisco, D.C. and Atlanta combined," Trautmann said in a 2024 TED talk.
With help from her professors, Trautmann and the team won a grant from the National Science Foundation to research how their sand could help with coastal erosion. They learned that they could use biodegradable sandbags and plant native grasses to build back the marshes.
From chemical engineering student to CEO
Trautmann has since graduated and turned this idea into a full-time job. She is CEO and co-founder of Glass Half Full, a company that offers both residential and commercial subscription models for people to have their glass picked up and recycled.
Five years in, they have recycled over 10 million bottles and operate in several major cities throughout Louisiana and the Gulf South. In March, Glass Half Full opened a facility in Chalmette, La., that will recycle over 300,000 pounds of glass per day.
While large-scale efforts are still needed to solve the coastal erosion crisis, Trautmann is optimistic their sand will play a part in restoring Louisiana's barrier islands and shoreline, as well as protect the land from natural disasters like floods.
"The key was that we simply started and we kept going," Trautmann said in her 2024 TED talk. "Somewhere, the belief that we as individuals could enact change trumped our doubts."
This segment of the TED Radio Hour was produced by Kai McNamee and Matthew Cloutier and was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour.
The digital story was written by Harsha Nahata.
You can follow us on Facebook and email us at TEDRadioHour@npr.org.
Related NPR links
NPR's Climate Desk: Reduce, reuse, redirect outrage: How plastic-makers used recycling as a fig leaf
All Things Considered: Recycling plastic is practically impossible — and the problem is getting worse
Short Wave: The Myth of Plastic Recycling
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