The nonprofit glass recycler Glass Half Full plans to build a $6.5 million, state-of-the-art facility in Chalmette, supported by a mix of grants and loans from Benson Capital Partners, the Meraux Foundation, and AMCREF Community Capital. The new 3-acre headquarters along Paris Road will be able to process hundreds of millions of pounds of glass annually, which should make it easier to expand glass recycling across the Gulf Coast region, said Franziska Trautmann, Glass Half Full co-founder and CEO.
鈥淚t will be capable of recycling 300,000 pounds of glass every single day, which is around 600,000 beer bottles every day,鈥� Trautmann said. 鈥淏ecause it鈥檚 capable of processing so much glass, we will be collecting from much farther out than just the New Orleans metropolitan area. This includes across Louisiana and Mississippi and even into coastal Alabama and Florida.鈥�
Glass Half Full was started in 2020 by Trautmann and Max Steitz, then Tulane University students. They wanted to revive glass recycling, which has been elusive locally since Hurricane Katrina, when the citys鈥檚 curbside program ended. Over the last two decades, there has been a patchwork of glass recycling programs available in the metro area, including paid curbside pickup programs and some free drop-off programs.