September 2020 Service

Total Sept Hours: 4

As the first month of masked graduate school has come and gone, I am so grateful to get to discuss the service I have gotten involved with in New Orleans this month. 

Last spring, a couple of my undergraduate classmates at Tulane founded the organization "Glass Half Full NOLA" (GHF). This "glassroots" organization had the time to grow immensely over the pandemic months in terms of planning, preparation, and execution of bringing glass recycling to not only New Orleans, but the entire state of Louisiana! The glass is processed into sand and cullet for disaster relief, helping prevent the further dredging damage on our beaches and their ecosystems.

The process starts with the glass drop-off. I volunteered a couple hours on a Wednesday at the Joilet St. location. People come up with bags full of glass that are dumped into one of the many glass recycling barrels. One of our jobs is to ensure the caps/tops were removed from glass before tossing into barrels. These barrels are old soap drums that have been painted and repurposed to promote sustainability! Once one of the barrels is full, we drag it out of the way of drop-off, and it is lined up to be brought to the Louisa St. location, which contains the machines that help grind the glass into sand. All of the work is done by hand, except for some help from a few glass grinding machines.  

This was the SOME of the glass collected in the two-hour time I was there. 


Safety was also not ignored. Everything was disinfected. If we were dealing with glass, we wore gardening gloves, long pants, and closed-toed shoes. Not a single community member tried to drop off their glass without a mask. Everyone working had their mask on at all times. It was a great reminder of how important this community has been to me since moving to NOLA in 2016.



GHF is currently organizing a fundraiser to support their mission of bringing sustainable glass recycling to Louisiana with a $100,000 goal, which they have already raised just short of $40K! This money will be going to fund a more industrial machine that will improve the speed at which all the glass can be broken down by sheer human force! Right now, all glass is truly processed by hand. 



One of the coolest aspects of this project, is that it began when a couple of college students were simply drinking beer, and said "wait a minute.." and truly thought about where our trash goes. The process began in the back and front yard of a Tulane fraternity house, and has grown so much since.      


Photo taken from GHF NOLA Instagram page: @glasshalffull.nola

For more information, check out this video on their YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/3DlibclKIQ4 

To volunteer, give, and find more info, check out glasshalffullnola.org 


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