Since the beginning of 2020, Franziska Trautmann and Max Steitz have been working to understand and rectify the multi-pronged, bureaucracy-laden community issue that is recycling—and it all began with glass. In a city well known for its drinking habits, the pair were struck with the idea to collect glass waste and grind enough of it into sand to facilitate coastal restoration in areas that are rapidly disappearing due to erosion. Then, they actually did it. I visited Trautmann and Steitz at Glass Half Full (GHF), the business and non-profit they now co-own and house in a warehouse in New Orleans East, to speak with them about their journey and excitement over the upcoming move to a new, custom-built warehouse in 2025.
Per your website, the lightbulb moment for Glass Half Full came over a shared bottle of wine. I’m sure you have had that elevator pitch line for a while now, but can you take me back to that night and set the scene?
Max Steitz: We were college seniors in our second semester at Tulane University at the time. This was in early 2020, pre-COVID, which definitely played a big role in those first months. But yeah, we were sitting around discussing this problem—this combination of problems, really: Of the glass [waste] that was being produced in New Orleans, and all of Louisiana for that matter, almost all of it was going to the landfill. And this especially being a place that prides itself on drinking so much and using so much glass, that felt crazy to us. But then we realized that we could actually potentially solve two big problems—the glass waste going to landfills and a coastal erosion problem. Fran can speak to it more, but Louisiana loses a profound amount of land due to coastal erosion every year. We knew that new glass came from sand, so if we could basically reverse that process to turn glass back into sand and refine it enough, it could be turned into usable sediment to restore the coasts. So that “lightbulb moment” really came about when we realized that we could potentially solve both really big problems with one solution. Then we kind of just jumped into it from there.
Did you have majors at the time that would lend themselves to a project like this? Or were you studying totally different things?
MS: I think Fran more so, as a chemical engineer. And Fran also spent the first two-and-a-half years at Tulane in the biology department. I was in the school of liberal arts in international development, so not super related.
Franziska Trautmann: Now on the coastal restoration science team, most of the professors are either in my first major, which was [ecology and evolutionary] biology. Or my second major, which was chemical engineering. So I’m working with a lot of my previous professors. But Max had business experience. He was majoring in international development, but he had started multiple businesses before, one being the shirt that you just walked in on, which was “Pugs For Obama.” He’s always been more of a startup businessperson and I feel like it was those two things, business and science, that really came together and made Glass Half Full successful, because one wouldn’t have been successful without the other.
Just because I’m curious, what were those other businesses and how many were there? MS: I definitely grew up in that world. My parents were both entrepreneurs, sister and brother are entrepreneurs. [“Pugs For Obama”] was probably my first actual business. I was 11 and I had a pug. Obama was coming up and I was like, wow, we should put a pug on a shirt.
FT: He sold them in front of Trump Tower.
MS: That was like a huge tourist place in New York City. I remember that literal lines of people were coming up to this TV tray I had with the shirts, and they were selling like hotcakes. And then more recently, when I was 15, I co-founded a company called Serengeti. That gave me a lot of experience running a business, hiring people, paying taxes, you know, all the fun stuff. I’ve kind of always known that I wanted to be in that world.
What took GHF from idea to a real thing you were doing? And what were the first steps? FT: We moved pretty quickly, I’d say. I think the immediate first thoughts were like, OK, we have this idea, we need money. So we started a GoFundMe within a few days, I think. We were like: Well if we get the funding then we can actually try it. And a couple of weeks in, we already had the machine. We had literal interns from Tulane that we recruited. And we were full of glass within a couple weeks. We set up in the backyard of Max’s fraternity house [Zeta Psi], with this small little machine. And we’re begging our friends to help us sort and crush glass after class. And then COVID hit. But for a few months there, it was go, go, go, go, go.
MS: We had raised, I think, $8,000 in that first GoFundMe, which at the time we thought was like all the money in the world, but obviously it’s not, so it was always very bootstrapped. At the beginning we were collecting glass in these old soap drums that were being thrown away. We sawed the tops off and washed them out and we just had these all over Uptown New Orleans collecting glass.
Did you have a sense that this was going to be an ongoing endeavor? Where did you think it was going?
FT: Obviously we thought it was a great idea because that’s why we put time and effort into it. But when the GoFundMe started to take off a few days later, it was like, how do we do this? How do we get out of this backyard? Question after question… is this really going to happen? Is this actually going to take off at scale? I’d say until probably the summer we still thought it would be this pet project. I remember Max and I were talking about passing it down to someone when we graduated, like a club. And then somewhere closer to June of 2020, we were like: This is our life. We are now glass people. We’re now waste management consultants. We were in it, full throttle.
How long were you in the backyard of the frat house before you moved to the Uptown location?
MS: That was probably about four-ish months, I’d say. We were collecting glass after glass. We bought a one-bottle-at-a-time glass crusher and a trailer that we were collecting glass in. And then COVID hit. And at the beginning, we all were hearing it was spread through touching things. We read an article that it lived on glass for seven days. And we were like: Oh my god, we’re in this backyard filled with hazardous material. So we pumped the brakes and shut down for about three months, which honestly allowed us to kind of reset and come back with a very formidable plan for once things opened up, or somewhat opened up. And we re-launched in June 2020 in a little Uptown “warehouse.” It was about 1,500 square feet, maybe a little less. We put out a dumpster to fill up with glass thinking that was going to last for a good while and it was literally filled within like 36 hours. We immediately outgrew that warehouse and ended up moving out to our current facility, which is about 40,000 square feet. Here we had enough space to really do our thing for the first couple years.
And as per your announcement this summer, you’re getting ready to move into a new space. What can you tell me about that?
FT: From the beginning of GHF, our problem was always too much glass with tiny machines. We would always grow just enough to get by, and so the goal of this facility really has always been to build a giant-ass facility with big machinery that can handle all the glass we want to collect from Louisiana to Alabama and fill the plant and recycle as much glass as possible. It’s a three-acre facility and has more outdoor space than this facility has. We’re investing in advanced optical sorting and technology that will allow us to increase our efficiency by about 30 times. Today, we recycle about 300,000 pounds a month of glass and this facility will enable us to do 300,000 pounds per day. We will be able to employ more people, get more trucks, get more receptacles, and ultimately, try to solve the problems I spoke about at the beginning. That was the magnitude of the problems. It’s hard to wrap your mind around sometimes. Since the beginning, we’ve needed a facility that could help combat those problems at that same magnitude. It’s being built on the shores of Bayou Bienvenue on a former landfill site. We broke [ground] around the beginning of July and we’re hoping to open up for operation early 2025.
An Andela Glass Pulverizer at the Glass Half Full warehouse allows 300,000 pounds of glass to be recycled every month.
Is it safe to assume you’ve both gotten an additional education in navigating local bureaucracies and how to get things done in a city like this?
FT: Absolutely. Talk about “learning by doing” in so many different ways. We got a crash course on the recycling industry nationally: why glass hadn’t been recycled in this region, how it’s recycled in other areas, why it works in other places. Also on coastal restoration, why are we eroding so quickly? What’s causing that? And how do we stop it? And then how do we combat it? And then how to run a business in New Orleans, but also anywhere.
What did you find out about why there historically isn’t glass recycling here?
FT: Glass is a unique child of the recycling industry. It’s a very different type of material. It’s the heaviest, which means it’s expensive to ship. So if you have a program where you have to ship glass more than 250 miles, you’re losing money, generally. For us in the Southeast, you always have to ship it pretty far because you usually have to get it to a bottle manufacturer or a processor that can then get it to a bottle manufacturer. We just have never really had that infrastructure here in the Southeast. That’s pretty much why we hadn’t had glass recycling. It’s also an issue in the single-stream recycling system (to be able to throw all of your recyclables in one bin). Glass is pretty much the only recycling material that’ll break. So it can crush into little pieces of glass, which can then be hazardous and additionally are really hard to sort. How a lot of systems work is when you send the material to what’s called a MRF, a material recovery facility, they’ll sort out glass last. They’ll just be like, let’s take the aluminum, let’s take the cardboard, let’s take the plastic. And then everything that’s left is “glass.” But literally, you cannot find the actual glass in the pile. It’s all trash. It’s paper and toothbrushes and all the weird small stuff that recycling facilities get that isn’t recycling. So, to be able to sort the actual glass from that pile requires a ton of infrastructure like sorters and burners and dryers and all these things and you need a robust recycling system, and we don’t generally have that in the South.
Are those problems you don’t see as much in other regions?
FT: Yeah. California has a bottle bill so there’s a value added to the glass. There’s money circulating in the recycling system to pay for such machinery and sorting technology. Same with Michigan and other places with a bottle bill. And then there’s places like New York, which just prioritize recycling more so they will invest that money to get that equipment to sort the glass from the trash.
You’ve also started collecting in places other than New Orleans and outside of the state. Where else are you currently, and how did you create a scalable plan? Was the mission to keep expanding? And how did you figure out how to make it adaptable to different places?
MS: I would say it was always part of the broader goal. I say it a lot, but New Orleans is very emblematic of a broader system that doesn’t have transparent, accessible glass recycling. It’s a problem that exists really all over the country. We thought that we had a different model, a different way of solving those problems, and we knew we wanted to spread that as far and as wide as possible. Currently we’re collecting glass in three states: Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, with multiple cities in each state. New Orleans obviously, Baton Rouge, Birmingham, Biloxi, Mobile, Fairhope, Ocean Springs, the Northshore, kind of all over.
What are some of the challenges you have run into during that expansion?
FT: When we moved into a place like Birmingham, I’d say it was a good surprise in terms of how much people also cared there and how excited they were about the service and the ability to recycle glass when they hadn’t otherwise. But then Baton Rouge isn’t as popular as we expected. Overall, it’s been a good response and we’re hopeful. One big lesson has been just how different every recycling system is from one another. Because there isn’t a national policy, and from city to city or state to state the policies are all different in what they recycle, why they recycle, their proximity to different end use. The facilities are all different and legislation, if any, is different from place to place.
A Recycle Dat volunteer stands next to recycling bins during the February 4th King Arthur parade on St. Charles Avenue.
On a national level, what kind of a situation or climate are we in with respect to recycling and our relationship to it?
FT: I actually think that’s something that is a big misconception about recycling. To what Max was saying, literally down to the county everything is different from one another. You’ll see these articles like, “Plastic isn’t recycled,” or “Recycling is broken,” but you really, truly cannot generalize anything in recycling. Take Louisiana, for example. There are municipalities like Orleans that do curbside recycling for everything except glass, but they only do plastics one and two. And then the neighboring parish, Jefferson Parish, now doesn’t collect anything. But they do have the drop-off program where everything is locally recycled through us or another partner. Even with glass, everything is so regionally dependent because recycling kind of only makes sense when you can get it to the end market that’s close to you. So that doesn’t always mean that glass is turned into bottles. Sometimes the closest plant is fiberglass insulation, which isn’t as sexy, but it’s still recycling. Same with plastic. Sometimes the closest plant is turning it into carpets or sometimes it’s turning it back into bottles. We’re overgeneralizing issues and not looking at the nuance of it.
MS: I’d add two things. Transportation: The U.S. is just a big country. Getting post-consumer waste to a material recovery facility, then to a processing facility, then to the end user costs a lot more money just because we are a bigger country than Europe, for example. It’s also the environmental toll that transporting that material over distance creates. It’s a big factor, right? If we’re doing recycling to benefit the environment, we don’t want the transport of it to produce more carbon. As Fran said, it’s definitely nuanced. And I’d say the second big thing that’s been pretty consistent from location to location that we’ve been to is the contamination. And that does come from the users. That’s definitely a big part of the problem that as a society, we have to look in the mirror. Maybe we do have it hardest in the recycling industry because everything else is picked out and what’s left is considered glass. But looking through this “glass,” there’s toothbrushes, chicken bones, ribs, tampons. Why would you think this is recyclable? One of the most difficult parts of recycling is that it’s kind of an inherently unfair system where you can have 100 people and 99 of them recycle the right way and they rinse out their bins and they sort only the recyclable material, and then you can have one person who spoils the bunch, basically.
Aside from your collecting and recycling of glass, what other projects and initiatives do you have going on right now?
FT: The main one is the Jefferson Parish program that we have going on right now. It’s kind of two-pronged. In addition to our normal residential glass pickup, we now offer mixed recycling pickups, since the government stopped their curbside recycling program in the last year. That just came about from demand. Jefferson Parish stopped their curbside and everyone was like, “Hey, could we recycle all of these things with you?” So we started doing that and then additionally—in partnership with Jefferson Parish—we helped open up some drop-off locations for all of those materials as well. We do that now on a weekly basis but hopefully in the future we can increase the options there.
MS: We also have three public drop offs in the French Quarter in partnership with the French Quarter Management District. Those collect glass, plastics one, plastics two, cardboard, paper, metals, aluminum, tin. And then also around the holidays for the past two years, we’ve done Christmas tree collection for coastal restoration. We’ll come pick it up or you can bring it to a drop-off location. That, and Mardi Gras bead recycling. We’ve been part of Recycle Dat for the past two years, recycling along the route and partnering with hotels to pick up beads and things that tourists don’t want to take home.
Volunteers from Glassroots and Common Ground Relief use recycled Christmas trees to rebuild and re-create marshbeds in areas where coastal erosion is prevalent. Each year, 25 to 35 miles of Louisiana coastland disappear due to sea level rise and other climate change-related factors.
And you have educational and non-profit arms as well, correct? Can you tell me just a little bit about those?
FT: Yeah, I think it goes back to the founding of GHF, which from the beginning we wanted to do both [a non-profit and a business]. So, that’s what we did. We know there can’t be total recycling infrastructure without the education piece. There can’t be robust recycling without people knowing what can be recycled and why, how it gets recycled, and how that makes an impact on their community. And we think that starts with the kids and learning in school. To the point Max made about coming down here and thinking, why isn’t there recycling? I’ve lived here my whole life and I’m like, that’s just a part of it, I just throw everything in the trash. That’s just what we do here, or we burn it. So imagine if I had been taught about recycling as a kid and then I could’ve questioned these things. But it took a New Yorker to come down and ask that question. And so we started Glassroots as a nonprofit to be able to provide education and outreach and community, to go into schools and talk about why it’s important to recycle, to partner with different communities and increase accessibility to recycling.
On your website, you have a citation that in the first year of business, you diverted over 300 tons of glass from the landfill. Do you know, from the beginning to now, what those numbers are closer to?
FT: Oh, way more than that. Last year, we did four million pounds of glass. Which is about 2,000 tons.
MS: This year we’ll probably do more than six million pounds.
And with regard to your longer-term coastal restoration projects, do you have any way of measuring the effects your work has had so far?
FT: With the coastal front, we have always partnered with scientists and engineers. We’ve gotten funding from the National Science Foundation to do the research on the safety and efficacy and the success of utilizing [recycled glass sand]. At all of our projects we implement monitoring that’s in line with the Coastwide Reference Monitoring System, the state agency on coastal restoration. We measure sediment accretion, vegetation, and how much has grown at all of our project sites.
MS: One of the most recent coastal erosion and restoration projects is happening right behind our new plant in St. Bernard. There are two different islands, one with dredged sand and the other with our sand. We’ll study the efficacy and validity over five years of monitoring those two different sites—a natural one and recycled glass sample.
Do either of you have anything else that you’d like to add before we wrap up?
MS: I think a lot of the time it’s framed as these two kids but we’ve gotten so much help along the way—from day one, when some random New Orleanians decided to throw 10 or 15 bucks to these college kids with a GoFundMe who had a pretty preposterous idea, all the way up until today. So many people have wanted to help and we definitely wouldn’t be here without them.
To find out more about Glass Half Full, including when and where to recycle your glass and other materials, visit glasshalffull.co or @glasshalffull.co on Instagram. To get involved, visit weareglassroots.org, @weareglassroots on Instagram, or @glasshalffull.co on TikTok.
Photos by Katie Sikora
Top photo: Steitz and Trautmann at the current warehouse on Louisa Street in the Desire area.
