Discarded glass does not usually end up holding a coastline together. But in June 2023, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, that’s what it did.
About 100 volunteers spent two days stacking burlap sacks filled with recycled glass sand. The result was a 300-foot barrier across a broken stretch of marsh. The sacks held roughly 50 tons of ground-up glass. It was the work of a New Orleans recycling outfit that began four years earlier, when two students couldn’t find anywhere to recycle their empy wine bottles.
Does bottle glass really do anything for an eroding shore? The short version: it is less strange than it sounds, and the early numbers are encouraging without being anything close to proof.
What ReCoast actually did at Big Branch Marsh
The recycling business is Glass Half Full, and its restoration arm is called ReCoast. The site was Big Branch Marsh National Wildlife Refuge, where Hurricane Ida had torn a gap through the shoreline in 2021. That let saltwater bleed into freshwater marsh and killed off the plants. According to the group’s account, reported by Good Good Good, the volunteer crew filled donated burlap sacks with glass sand and walked them into place to close the gap…