Amanda in Pharmacology

March hours: 3  Running total: 21  Saturday was a HOT, but lovely day at GHF! Fran even brought Miss Tchoupitoulas, she and Max's dog, the glass mascot! After Matt and I dropped off the glass that we collect from friends, we got busy helping out! Right when we arrived, Chris from Parish Brewing Co brought the organization a HUGE donation full of beers and wine!  After our initial shenanigans picking out bottles to try, we settled into our jobs. While Matt begin filling & weighing sandbags, I joined the "Agnes Table" where some real glass magic happens. Agnes collects all the special bottles, blue glass, candles, vases, cups, and random items that aren't glass. Here is one of her many collections:   She even put a ton of beautiful vases in a bin with a sign out front to give away to glass recyclers! I know I've mentioned before that I have many vases from GHF! I also have a jar and some bowls after today! Agnes and I worked together soaking, scrubbing, and prep

February Hours: 3 Running Total: 18      After our second exam this month, I hopped in my car with all of my glass and headed to Louisa street for another afternoon with GHF!       Agnes was there- she is one of my favorite volunteers to work with. The warehouse has an "Agnes Zone" where she stores, cleans, and organizes special glass that she repurposes, gives away to NOLA artists & creators. Large drums of glass can be reused for making beer/wine. We also get tons of beautiful vases, cups, random glass objects that Agnes stores and lets people take if they want it! I have a few vases from GHF that I have been keeping full of Trader Joe's flowers the past few months.  Lots of the bottles we receive have pieces that cannot go into the machines immediately. Whiskey bottles with rubber decoration, champagne bottles with metal bottoms, and anything with a lagniappe of plastic. I recorded myself using a screwdriver to peel off plastics from vodka (or gin? I don't reme

January Hours: 2 Total Hours for year: 15 I hope everyone had an excellent holiday season! I can tell by my first shift back with GHF that most of NOLA did! 😂 We were closed from Dec 16th - Jan 9th, and the NOLA people made sure to save their celebratory Veuve Clicquot bottles for us!  Santa (fundraising endeavors & donations) also treated us well this Christmas! All of our glass previously was disposed & sorted in old soap drums. These are pretty annoying to lug around. We have adapted to using machinery & equipment (like my scooter from November) to move the soap drums. Now we have TONS of new, glass recycling bins! They are much easier to move around.  Another endeavor GHF focused on over the holidays was growing the residential pick-up service.  Information on how to sign up for this can be found at: https://glasshalffullnola.org/residents At this point, we still have much of "Glass Mountain" to tackle, but a remarkable portion of it has been ground into cull

Monthly Hours: 3  Total: 13  I will add to this post as I complete more hours with GHF this month! Today I went to the Joilet location, because they were short on volunteers during their busiest, midday time! I picked up glass from a friend's house and headed over!  Today, I did the usual help/instruction with people dropping off their glass. One of the other frequent volunteers, Inez, brought in chocolate croissants for us from Gracious Bakery! We then got to sorting some of the barrels. We took out the royal blues, extra large liquor bottles, and any Veuve Cliquot bottles we could find!  We got to the point of almost having no empty barrels, but then Fran came back with the trailer of more from Louisa St! They deliver as many barrels that fit into the trailer as possible, bus them to Louisa St, and bring back more empty barrels! The location near River Road is much smaller, and cannot house nearly the quantity of glass the Louisa St location can.  In other news, yesterday my dog

 November Total Hours: 5      It was another amazing month of record-breaking collection days at Glass Half Full! I had my first shift at the big warehouse on Louisa St. At this location, we sort glass by colors! We separate the dark, clear, light green, and blue glass in different soap drums. After sorting 200+ glass bottles, I STILL cannot tell which glass is "light" green versus dark green, though. Easy candidates are Heineken, Perrier, & Pellegrino bottles. I also learned how to use the sand-making machines! There were a couple I learned how to operate & got better at using.      The one I'm putting the wine bottle into jams easily, but super simple to fix. You load a glass bottle upside down through the flaps, wait a few seconds, listen for a swift grind, and repeat with the next bottle in the drum! It takes ~ 60 bottles to fill the collecting bucket underneath with the first grind of sand. Once the bucket is full, we pick it up and dump it into this crazy ma

Total Oct Hours: 1 With the release of a new fundraising raffle, reaching almost HALF the fundraising goal, and collecting thousands of bottles of glass during each drop off, it's been a very exciting month with GHF!  Today is the day that Zeta is supposed to make landfall as a Category 2 Hurricane. Yesterday, GHF handed out donation-based sandbags for those in the city with the need. Glass drop off today is closed, and will likely reopen on Saturday! I volunteered last Tuesday, the day before drop off at Joilet St. We prepared the warehouse for the next day's drop offs!  1. This first image (red square) shows the MOUNTAIN of bags/boxes of glass we sorted into milk crates. The focus wasn't on specific color-coding today, but whenever we find a Skyy Vodka bottle or a Bud Lite Platinum, we store it separately. When the cobalt glass gets sifted, it creates a beautiful sand color!  2. These are milk crates stocked and ready to be transported to the Louisa St. warehouse for proc