Posted on August 10, 2026
NEW ORLEANS, U.S. — On a cold Saturday in late January, a parade floats rolls down Royal Street painted with the image of the Louisiana coastline, eroding away. The next float displays Lady Liberty gagged and locked behind a chain-link fence.
This is Krewe du Vieux, the raunchy, mule-drawn satirical parade that has rolled through New Orleans’ French Quarter for 40 years, making political jokes few others dare to make in public. Its 2026 theme is “Save the Wet Glands,” a play on “save the wetlands.”
This year’s Krewe du Vieux Queen is Franziska Trautmann, the pink-haired co-founder and CEO of Glass Half Full, a business that takes the city’s glass bottles and turns them into sand used to rebuild Louisiana’s dwindling coast.
Growing up here, the coastal erosion crisis is “like the boogeyman,” Trautmann told me outside the Glass Half Full facility in Chalmette, Louisiana. “It’s this overwhelming thing looming in the distance.”
Most locals have heard the statistics: roughly a football field of Louisiana is lost to the sea every hour. Large areas of grassy marshes and tree-laden swamps that once knit the coast together have succumbed to erosion after more than a century of being sliced apart by roads, oil pipelines, and canals. Reduced sediment flow from the Mississippi River brings less would-be land down south. Also, the land is sinking, and the sea is rising.
But in New Orleans, where tragedy and joy are often held in the same cup, Krewe du Vieux is parading about it.
On the parade route, a reveler with a bushy black mustache peers through the face-hole of a big yellow star costume. The star raises its Miller High Life bottle and shouts “Woo!” as a brass band thumps by. Later, it tosses the bottle in a plastic bin outside Anna’s bar.
By Tuesday morning, the glass bottle is in a box truck headed just a few kilometers east to Chalmette, home to the Glass Half Full recycling plant.
