World News for Students of English

07-06-2022 07:00

24-year-old Franziska Trautman is called the sand girl on TikTok because she’s trying to restore Louisiana’s eroding coastline with glass sand.

Franziska was disappointed with the lack of glass recycling facilities in her state, so she co-founded the first and only facility in Louisiana, US.

She realized that glass can be changed into sand, and the glass could help with the coastal erosion crisis. Franziska and her friend launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to purchase their first glass recycling machine. So far, the facility has diverted almost one million kilograms of glass from landfills into sand. Machines crush the glass and take out the labels, metal pieces, and the non-glass particles. The result is a mixture of glass, sand, and gravel which she uses for disaster relief sandbags, coastal restoration, or flooring.

After water, sand is the second globally exploited resource, and people use it at twice the rate that nature creates it.

Difficult words: erode (to be destroyed gradually), gravel (very small, rounded stones often mixed with sand), exploit (to use of something to make a profit).

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