Every place has a different set of rules when it comes to recycling. In some cities, you toss something in the blue bin and actually feel good about it knowing it’s going to the right place. In others cities, well… not so much. You start to wonder if all that sorting and rinsing even matters.

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When we moved to Lafayette and found out there was no glass recycling, we couldn’t bring ourselves to just throw our bottles away. So we started saving them in our barn, hoping that somehow things would change. Turns out, a lot of people were doing the exact same thing—holding onto glass, waiting for a solution that never seemed to come.

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Dawn and I had been kicking around ideas for a while. There had to be something we could do with all this glass. We read about small operations where people were collecting bottles, crushing them, and turning them into sand. It didn’t seem impossible... we had two people, a yard, and some basic equipment—maybe we could actually make it work. As the bottles piled up in the barn, it felt less like an idea and more like a deadline.

 

The machinery we wanted was too expensive so we built our own glass crusher. Our homemade crusher gave us three different sizes of crushed glass. Suddenly we realized we weren’t just making sand—we were making something special. The colors, the texture—it looked like a Backyard Sapphire. Just like that, we were in the glass mulch business!  Now we sift, we crush, and we blend colorful bottles into beautiful sustainable products that beautify your home and garden.  

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BackYard Sapphire officially launched in February of 2021.  

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Cheers,

Tina & Dawn