Sea glass, with its soft edges, odd shapes, and not quite see-through greens , whites and ambers, gives the impression of being almost otherworldly. Perhaps that’s why so many beachcombers collect it, and why it’s sold at prices ranging from a few dollars a pound for loose pieces to a few hundred dollars for an item of jewellery made using it.
The truth is, sea glass is quite of this world: Shards of broken bottles, bowls, jars and other glass items – literally trash – get tossed about in the waves for decades before landing on a beach as sea glass.
Charlotte McDevitt, executive director of the environmental non-profit organisation Green VI, wants to help change that.
If her efforts work, the Virgin Islands will not only have a source for locally made sea glass, it will also have an alternative to burning glass bottles in the already overtaxed incinerator.
“Right now, they have to shut the incinerator down to go inside and chip off glass that has melted and stuck to the inside,” Ms. McDevitt said at the Tortola Concrete facility in Pockwood Pond last week. The company volunteered the use of some of its equipment for the experiment.
Ms. McDevitt’s experiment is designed to recreate the motion of the ocean, so to speak, with machinery normally used for construction. After collecting a truckload of glass bottles from BVI Recycling in Sea Cows Bay, Ms. McDevitt and others from Green VI and Tortola Concrete dumped the glass into a holding unit so it could be transferred into the rotating tumbler of a cement truck.
Preliminary tumbling of bottle shards in a much smaller tumbler suggested that several hours of tumbling should do the trick, Ms. McDevitt said at the time. “We’re going to use the glass to decorate the exterior of our office,” she said.
The full article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue.