Recycled Glass Trails

Photo by C. Tonsor

Three years ago, while working on the AMD Lonestar project here in Austin  http://www.sustainablefacility.com/CDA/Articles/Industry_Watch/BNP_GUID_9-5-2006_A_10000000000000625547, the design team decided to try an alternate for the typical decomposed granite trail.  The City of Austin offers recycled glass that you could get pretty much at cost, but would have to pay for delivery.  It was proposed that we could mix the recycled glass with the excavated caliche from the site and make a trail that would compact like d.g.   The team worked with The Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (CMPBS and some call it MAXPOT www.cmpbs.org) to create some test studies for a recycled glass trail.  The recipe was to mix different percentages of the glass with the caliche and we would evaluate each one to see which looked and held up the best to foot traffic.  We did studies with the glass at 50%, 75%, 90% and 100%.  We determined that the 50% and 75% seemed to work the best. 

Photo by C. Tonsor

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The kicker was that d.g. trails are accessible, and we would need our glass/caliche trail to be as well.  We decided to mock-up the trails on site and have our Registered Accessibility Specialist test them out for approval.  Unfortunately, because of budget constraints and schedule, we had to install the decomposed granite as the trail material.   The expansive nature trails we had planned to use the glass on were also delayed. 

How does this relate to our Children’s Garden project?  We’re trying to use this material again on this site.  It will depend on the caliche we can pull from the site and if we can get the accessibility approved.  One thing we did learn from the trials is that we need to have a second tumbling on the glass.  Some people were concerned with the sharpness of the glass and would it cut your feet or hands, but we argued that the d.g. fines are just as sharp.