That empty glass wine bottle or pasta sauce jar sitting in your kitchen could become sand used in sandbags to protect against flooding thanks to a new partnership between Lafayette Consolidated Government and a grassroots glass recycling company. BackYard Sapphire, the homegrown glass recycling business launched by Tina Crapsi and Dawn Vincent last year, has partnered with Lafayette Consolidated Government to provide sand made from crushed glass for the city-parish’s sandbagging sites.
The operation plans to supply between a ton to a ton-and-a-half of sand to the city-parish each month. BackYard Sapphire is currently diverting about two tons of glass a month from landfills and repurposing it; having a dedicated end point for most of their product will allow them to take in more glass, Crapsi said. Crapsi and Vincent began their operation in the backyard of their Lafayette home in February 2021 with a focus on turning glass into mulch and pebbles for garden or decorative use.
The couple added a machine that crushes glass into sand in November after finding the market for glass mulch was too limited to offload the amount of glass they were taking in. They began piling the sand in their yard, getting the hang of the production cycle while learning how best to market the sand and find buyers. Enter Lafayette Consolidated Government. The sand purchased from BackYard Sapphire will be used to fill sandbags at the Dean Domingues Compost Facility, just in time for hurricane season, LCG announced.