WHAT'S GLASSLAND?
JUNE 21, 2018
GlassLand is a recycler of glass. Nothing else. We specialize exclusively in glass collection and re-use.
GlassLand was founded to provide genuine glass recycling in New Orleans and the surrounding area.
We collect waste glass bottles and jars from both businesses and residents. We maintain residential disposal sites and sell advertising on the collection containers. We transport the waste to our glass processing plant where it is transformed back into a form of real sand known as glass-sand.
We make a product branded as GlasSand™ -- in a range of grades and custom meshes suitable for reuse by a variety of industries. Some is sold through distributors to traditional industrial end-users for blasting, bottle-making, fiberglass manufacture, road surfacing and filtering.
But we specialize in direct sale to the recreational market and to the rapidly growing coastal restoration and protection market. Here in Louisiana, the coastal restoration market is being hailed as potentially the largest industrial single end-user of glass-sand in the world.
In short we collect, haul, crush, manufacture and sell recycled glass ( a plentiful "natural resource - once removed” ) to create and enjoy new land. Land made from glass: "GlassLand."
5000 bottles headed to the crushing plant.
"GENUINE" RECYCLING: The Six Steps
Step One: Disposal
Residents bring their glass to a convenient neighborhood disposal container and drop it in. No need to rinse or sort.
Step Two: Collection
Neighborhood containers are picked up regularly and hauled to a local glass processing plant.
Step Three: Transport
40 or more tons of glass are transported to the processing plant each week - about 2000 tons a year. Thats 4 MILLION pounds of glass - around 3,500,000 bottles and jars!
Step Four: Processing - Re-manufacture - Transformation
The plant crushes and transforms the bottles into a range of custom graded glass products for resale.
Step Five: Resale
Surrogate sand -- GlasSand(TM) --products are sold to the recreation, coastal protection and coastal restoration industries.
Step Six: Re-Use
The glass ends up in sandbags, in sandboxes and volleyball courts, in golf course sandtraps, on beaches, as dunes and islands. Only when re-used has it been genuinely RECYCLED!
A FEW FACTS
We're sinking into the sea, and drowning in waste glass
- New Orleans, one of the “Beverage Capitals of America,” throws an estimated 60,000 tons of glass bottles into the landfill annually. And it costs taxpayers $1.8 million dollars every year just to dump it - $32 for every ton buried. Ton after ton, day after day. **
- Those 95,000,000 bottles and jars comprise much of the total trash thrown into the dump. It costs over $26 million a year for city-wide garbage collection, so about $8 million is attributable to the pickup of glass waste.
- Put differently: if glass were kept out of the trash and recycled, we'd save almost $9.8 million a year.
But there's more.
- All that glass is filling up the landfill to the point of capacity. As it does so, the toxic mass of garbage and glass poisons the groundwater supply. Think of the slime entering the ground when rain percolates through 400 ACRES of exposed garbage! (No, it's not covered; and its not immune to hurricanes and tornado damage either.)
- The $8 million doesn't include the cost of protecting residents from the toxicity associated with almost every landfill - particularly those as old as River Birch. That's because the real cost is almost impossible to calculate - since we haven't even begun the effort. But it's likely many millions of dollars more.
- Meanwhile, when the dump is full, it will have to be replaced and its decaying contents monitored. With the skyrocketing cost of land and necessary regulatory compliance, replacement will cost scores of millions of dollars, at an average cost in 2018 of $250,000 an acre! (Privately owned River Birch has been valued at $250,000,000.) That future cost too must be taken into account when calculating the real cost of our failure to recycle.
Bottom Line: the REAL cost of treating glass as garbage, and failing to recycle it, is substantial. More than enough to pay for a world-class model glass recycling and processing program. Several times over.
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** EPA figures show that in 2014 - the latest year for which statistics have been published - 38% of glass waste was recycled nationally, and 62% went to the landfills. We estimate that 30% of our annual trash deposit is glass.
* IN NEW ORLEANS TERMS, THAT'S THE EQUIVALENT OF FILLING UP THE SUPER DOME EVERY 5 WEEKS.
ALSO:
- New Orleans is one of the few major US cities that has no comprehensive glass recycling program in place. Residents can drop off a limited number of bottles at a largely inconvenient location a total of 5 HOURS a month.
- It’s not enough that glass waste is disposed of and hauled away. That’s just “collection” and too often results in eventual delivery to the landfill. It's what's done with the glass that's important.
- “Real” or “genuine” recycling assures that the collected glass is re-manufactured into another product or for another service, then re-sold back into the commercial stream.
- Myths about glass recycling abound. “No one wants it.” It’s too heavy to transport.” “It’s too hard to remanufacture.” “It destroys machinery.” “It contaminates other recyclables.” (All but the last one are false. And it contaminates only when mixed with other materials in politically popular but often ineffective “single stream” “recycling” programs. )
Yes, glass is challenging. It doesn’t fit easily into the trash hauling, materials recovery, one-size-fits-all approach to general recycling. It requires specialized, heavy-duty equipment for transport and modern, efficient processing equipment, in company with unique safety procedures and expertise.
It's a job for GlassLand.
SAND V. GLASS: HOW DO THEY COMPARE
We can produce a grade and mesh of glass to match most varieties of sand and meet the particular needs of our customers
END USERS - the markets for glass sand
RECREATIONAL USE
- PLAYGROUNDS - SANDBOXES
- VOLLEYBALL COURTS
- GOLF COURSE BUNKERS
- BASEBALL INFIELDS
- SAND SOCCER FIELDS
COASTAL PRESERVATION AND PROTECTION
- SANDBAGS
- DUNE REPLACEMENT
- BEACH RENOURISHMENT
- ISLAND CONSTRUCTION
- SEABED REPAIR
- CANAL FILLING
- WETLAND RESTORATION
- DREDGING FILL
- DRILLING MITIGATION
INDUSTRIAL
Current:
- EQUIPMENT GLASSBLASTING
- RESTORATION GLASSBLASTING
- FILTERING SYSTEMS
- SIGN BALLAST
- BULK-PACKED BARRIERS
Future:
- BOTTLE MANUFACTURE
- FIBERGLASS
- ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING - 3D PRINTING
THE SAND TO GLASS TO SAND MODEL
Put simply, we transform old glass bottles and jars into a variety of glass sands suitable to replace naturally formed 4W sands in various products.
LANDSCAPING
- YARDS
- WALKWAYS
- PAVEMENT
- ROADWAYS
CUSTOM PRODUCTION
Using either 4W sand samples or drawing board property specifications, we will create custom glass products to match customer requirements.