October 2020 Service with GHF

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 processing! Labels are fine to leave on, they get sifted out after the bottles are run through the crushing machine, and then hand-sifted into sand. 


3. This picture doesn't do the shear size of this bag justice. You could probably fit 6-8 normal-sized humans standing up in this bag. Cardboard and paper is torn into small pieces, and allowed to decompose and become soil! In the month of November, I will volunteer at the Louisa St. location, where the composting endeavor takes place, so I can share more pictures/principles of the soil-making process! 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February 2021 Service

Image
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
Read more

November 2020 Service

Image
 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
Read more

April 2021 Service: NOLA Ready Vaccines

Image
April Hours: 16  Running total: 37  This month, I have begun a new volunteering endeavor! I still work with Glass Half Full, and have begun recycling class for houses on my street, and have taken about 100 lbs of glass from other homes! I haven't volunteered this month at the warehouse. In addition, I spent about 4 hours doing FEMA trainings, and I have worked two 6-hour shifts working with NOLA Ready.   NOLA Ready teamed up with LCMC in order to help with vaccine distribution throughout the city of New Orleans. Our 'pod' is based in Hall J of the Convention Center. I have only helped with screening/entry. Each day is different, and a different dose is given out (Pfizer Dose 1, Moderna Dose 2, etc). When people walk in the doors, I greet them with a thermometer and a screening card. I also double check which dose they are receiving to be sure they don't get the wrong one!                                                                      Here is me and my handy-dandy
Read more