On different stretches of Louisiana’s coast, three scenes captured the same fight in three very different ways: a drone survey in Quarantine Bay in January 2026, a reef build in Grand Isle in August 2024 and a glass-to-sand operation in St. Bernard Parish in July 2025. Together, they show how New Orleans-based climate tech startup RCoast and Glass Half Full are trying to turn waste, data and engineering into protection for land that is still disappearing.
RCoast geospatial data analyst Dallon Weathers stood on new land being built in Quarantine Bay, Louisiana, as the company’s drones gathered data to support coastal restoration efforts nationwide. The startup, founded by former NASA scientist Christy Swann, uses the flights to track conditions that can help guide where and how restoration work should happen. In another project, workers used a special claw on a backhoe to lower one of 500 3D printed concrete modules from a barge into the gulf to help build a reef in Grand Isle, where Todd Graves watched the placement as the structure took shape under the water.
That same sense of experimentation shows up in St. Bernard Parish, where Glass Half Full has been grinding bottles into sand and testing whether native plants can take root on it. On Tuesday, July 8, 2025, co-founder and COO Max Steitz tossed a bottle while standing on a giant pile of glass waiting to be recycled at the Paris Road facility, and co-founder and CEO Franziska Trautmann knelt by a pile of glass that had already been recycled into sand behind the site. She and her coworkers were watching how much and how quickly native vegetation established itself on a small round island made entirely of recycled glass.
The common thread is urgency. Louisiana’s coast is eroding fast, and the work behind these projects is not theoretical anymore; it is being tested in real water, real soil and real weather. That matters now because the state’s restoration efforts are leaning on private companies to move from promising concepts to measurable results, whether the tool is a drone, a reef module or a pile of recycled bottles. The question is no longer whether these ideas can sound useful. It is whether they can scale quickly enough to matter before more ground is lost.
For Swann, Weathers, Steitz and Trautmann, the answer is being built in pieces. The land in Quarantine Bay, the reef off Grand Isle and the glass island behind the St. Bernard Parish facility are all small by themselves. Put together, they are a snapshot of where coastal restoration in Louisiana is headed: practical, improvised and very much still under construction.
