Then the sand is harvested to make glass products. I'm all for keeping beaches sandy. But I imagine that recycled glass is best used for glass products, and we can leave the beaches alone.

Does it really make sense? How much energy goes into crushing a bottle?

Crushing a bottle? Try. Go outside, and throw the bottle on the hard concrete. Was that too hard?

Crushing a bottle to sand-like quality might take a bit more energy than smashing one. Its most like more cost effective than dredging or they wouldn't be doing it. Energy effective? Who knows.

"Crushing a bottle? Try. Go outside, and throw the bottle on the hard concrete. Was that too hard?"

go walk on that and tell us how nice and sandy it feels

I thought crushed glass was a bad thing. Couldn't there be injuries from glass shards?

In April of 1982 a glass broke on my mother's kitchen floor. No one has been allowed to walk barefoot in the kitchen since.

On Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, there is a beach called Glass beach. This is because back in the fifties or sixties, servicemen would frequent a club that sat atop the cliffs over the beach. It was common for them to toss their bottles over the side onto the rocks. Over the years the polishing effects of the tides and the existing sands made all of the glass extremely smooth. I suspect the same would apply in Florida.

In NY they experimented about 15 years ago with glassphalt, which was smoothed chunks of melted glass mixed in as aggregate with asphalt. It didn't work because the resulting mixture, when hardened, still had a tendency to creep and warp under the stress of rolling tires, because it's difficult for anything to adhere to smooth glass. It was an attempt to find a home for tons of recycled glass and didn't work. However, it might work for beaches. If you tumble or melt the stuff so it's relatively smooth, it could add bulk to a sand beach, or act as a barrier in places where underwater currents are eroding the sea floor, either placed in piles or as aggregate in cement.

Erosion doesn't just occur above water. If you look at the profile, you'll see that erosion underneath the surface is what drives erosion above the surface. If the stuff is ugly or people don't want to look at it, it could still find use underwater.

This is like stuffing beer cans into a hole in the ground, and then mining the aluminum back out of it.

Anonymous,

Stuffing beer cans in the ground then mining the aluminum later is still quite preferable to digging for bauxite.

I wonder if they are going to keep the glass colors separate so that florida will have some white sand, green sand, and brown sandy beaches?

I once had the tiniest piece of glass stuck in my toe for two weeks, the result of a broken jar on my kitchen floor. I finally removed the shard with some pain. The size of it astonished me. Less then one millimeter wide by about 1.5 millimeters long!
I think no matter how small the pieces are from the smashed bottles you still need to process it further in order remove the sharp edges and save peoples feet.

I have tons of sheet glass, where can I recycle this for the beach project?

People wonder why I am curious about the world around me, it's to have an idea of how things work. And if you know enough bits and pieces about things then you can really have an idea of what fits together.
The comments I've read are full of half ideas that need responses to -- because the writers need more information
To make it short -- glass is made from sand. We've had glass since before Roman times and they didn't have special chemicals etc. They used SAND.

Many of the most beautiful "sandy" beached in America have a special quality. They are ground quartz. Think glass is hard to crush? Think Quartz crystal might be hard to walk on? Probably. But somehow nature works it so that course from the mountains winds up in little chucks in streams, which become littler which become littler, the streams meet rivers like the Missisisppi. Eventually the quartz is ground down and currents push it ashore. This powdery white sand came be seen at Destin Beach Florida for example. By the way, have you heard of the pink beaches of the Bahamas? Same kind of thing only it's ground conch shells.

Here's some more information if you think it's not worth the money. We have plenty of glass bottles -- where might they hang out? Land that's being rented that might be used better for something else, land fills, crated out to sea which costs shipping, you get the idea.

Where do we get sand? It's not easy or cheap to go dig some up off the shore. Sometimes it would cause a big problem to do that.as in eco-disaster. We often wind up buying sand from the Middle East. Talk about shipping costs in terms of petroleum .products? That sand you by at the hardware store by the way, have you ever wondered where that came from?

We need not to patch things up willy-nilly. But before we attack some ones ideas for a solution we need to see and hear all sides of it. The media telling us doesn't always give us all the information, because they can't it would become a tome of information. Since they don't also give us that in blogs or articles it can be up to us. Learn where things come from, why they are what they are, don't just take the world on an as is basis. Remember that people may see the world in 2070 and think that is the way things "are supposed to be" -- because they might not have asked enough questions.

Just for the record all marine ecosystems are very important to me, especially Florida's. And I have just learned about this project with this article. I am in no way related to it. But I do want to learn more about it.