Somewhere in Louisiana there's a wine bottle that started the night as a bad decision and ended it protecting a coastline.

New Orleans was tossing bottles into landfills, so students upcycled 14 million lbs of glass into coastal sand

Franziska Trautmann and Max Steitz founded Glass Half Full in 2020 after realizing New Orleans offered no curbside glass recycling. Starting with a single-bottle crusher in a fraternity backyard, the Tulane students scaled the operation until it had diverted 14 million pounds of glass from landfills. Their crushed glass passed environmental testing for coastal use, and the company has since deployed it in restoration projects with the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe and wildlife refuges along Lake Pontchartrain, where Louisiana loses up to 75 square kilometers of wetlands a year.

Source: New Orleans was tossing bottles into landfills, so students upcycled 14 million lbs of glass into coastal sand — Upworthy

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A daily AI-made news meme from Jester · Sep 29, 2026.