By Frank Carini / ecoRI News columnist
NEWPORT, R.I. — The City-by-the-Sea’s most popular beach is rapidly washing away. The warming Atlantic Ocean and the climate crisis have come calling. The snack bar and carousel buildings, built four decades ago, were too heavily damaged to be saved, and the Save The Bay aquarium has since retreated to America’s Cup Avenue.
The rotunda, built in the late 1930s, and the bathhouses are on borrowed time. A 2022 report commissioned by the city predicted there will no longer be an Easton’s Beach by 2070 if nothing is done. The 106-page report and the Coastal Resources Management Council believe the beach will likely experience 5 feet of sea level rise by then.
A climate and flood resilience engineer has told city officials that by 2030 there will be a 10% annual chance for a storm that could impact the remaining structures, and by 2070 there will be a 50% to 100% chance for flooding to occur every year.
Easton’s Beach is eroding at an average rate of a foot and a half annually. Rebuilding attractions, or building anything for that matter, so close to the encroaching sea would be a waste of money and time. Elevating structures to accommodate lost amenities or building new ones isn’t a solution. Any built structure now there or added later will require increasingly expensive maintenance.
Dunes and beachgrass are the prudent choices. It’s also time to sacrifice parking and rip up asphalt to make room for more appropriate seaside landscaping. City crews routinely have to shovel sand off the pavement anyway. Easton’s Beach natural sand is very fine and is easily blown around, especially during storms.
As for the rest of the sand that can’t be shoveled back into place, one idea being floated to help shore up the beach and stem erosion, a sand replenishment project, would cost millions of dollars and would only be a short-term Band-Aid.
A longtime local resident who lives about five blocks away has offered what she believes is a lower cost and more environmentally friendly solution to Easton’s Beach erosion problem: glass.
Over a recent cup of coffee on Broadway, Toni Wallace Ciany, a former recycling coordinator for the city, made her case for the material made of sand (silicon dioxide), soda ash (sodium carbonate), and limestone (calcium carbonate).
Like water, sand is an exploited resource. Glass could provide a reasonable alternative.
“The amount of sand that is consumed annually is twice the amount of sand that is produced every year naturally by every river in the world,” according to Sheila Puffer, a professor of international business at Northeastern University whose research focuses on global sand prices and sustainable sand substitutes in the construction industry. “And most of that sand goes into the production of concrete.”
Wallace Ciany believes Rhode Island should be reusing glass, not burying it.
“Glass has an impeccable reputation as a sterile container for food and beverages and is 100 percent recyclable,” she said. “It has multiple applications. Why are we landfilling it?”
The Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC), which manages and operates the Central Landfill in Johnston, collects about 20,000 tons of glass annually. It’s crushed and buried in the ever-shrinking landfill.
“Currently, glass is, for all intents and purposes, unsellable in any form,” according to a 2018 RIRRC study. The corporation still wants it collected in recycling bins in hopes the market for glass shifts.
The nationwide glass recycling rate is about 33%. In Switzerland, Germany, and other European countries glass is recycled at a 90% rate. Besides making new glass bottles, recycled glass can be used in the production of fiberglass, as an aggregate in concrete and asphalt, and to make tile, countertops, and sand.
An Easton’s Beach sand renourishment is projected to cost between $10 million and $12 million every three years, city officials and hired experts estimated in March.
Wallace Ciany, who, in 1987, helped bring recycling to the Newport Folk and Jazz festivals, believes the Ocean State could put a wasted resource to better use.
The Gibbs Avenue resident pointed to Louisiana as a place to look for inspiration. She has done her research. She found that Annie Collins, founder of Glass Act Recycling in Alexandria, and Franziska Trautmann, co-founder of Glass Half Full in New Orleans, had asked themselves the same question: Why are we wasting glass?
Since its inception in 2020, Glass Half Full has diverted millions of pounds of glass from being landfilled, with the goal of using the resource to restore Louisiana’s eroding shoreline and “rebuilding the barrier islands and sandbars that protect our coast from tropical storms and hurricanes.”
The company recycles about 150,000 pounds of glass bottles monthly into sand. Some is put in sandbags that can be used to slow flooding and some is used for coastal restoration projects. For example, 20,000 pounds of the company’s sand was used to help restore a marsh on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain that had been damaged during Hurricane Ida.
Glass Act Recycling crushes glass into abrasives for sand blasters and filtration for swimming pools.
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley researchers, in collaboration with New Orleans-based ReCoast and Tulane University, are also turning glass into a possible solution for coastal erosion.
“Millions of tons of glass waste end up in our landfills every year while we continue to lose miles of coastline due to erosion,” according to ReCoast.
Wallace Ciany noted that Louisiana doesn’t have an organized statewide program that collects glass, as it varies from parish to parish.
“Both of these companies were grassroots efforts that had to solicit community leaders and volunteers,” she said. “We already have a state-administered program and plenty of glass. As I see it, all we need is to divert the glass in the sorting process at [RIRRC’s Material Recycling Facility] to processing by a glass pulverizer that can crush up to 1,500 pounds of glass per hour.”
Wallace Ciany’s research found the cost for a glass pulverizing system is around $200,000. She noted the benefits of making glass sand are three-fold: Extend the life of the Central Landfill; save coastal municipalities money; reuse a resource.
“What do we have to lose?” she asked.
Wallace Ciany has shared her glass sand idea with Newport’s mayor, the city’s sustainability coordinator, and the state Department of Environmental Management. Local and state officials are aware Easton’s Beach is in trouble, but the possible solutions are still being debated.
Severe storms in rapid succession during the 2023-24 winter exacerbated the erosion problems at Easton’s Beach, better known locally as “First Beach,” and across a four-lane road from Easton’s Pond.
The beach next to the Cliff Walk — deteriorating at a much faster clip that no amount of money will stop — acts as a protective barrier between the sea and Easton’s Pond, an Aquidneck Island drinking water source. The reservoir, one of nine that feeds the Newport Water Division, needs to be protected more than Easton’s Beach needs to be recreated.
During more frequent and intense weather since Superstorm Sandy in 2012, storm surge has made its way across Memorial Boulevard, prompting both local and state responses to prevent saltwater intrusion into Easton’s Pond.
Those 2023-24 winter storms caused just as much erosion to the beach as Superstorm Sandy did.
Save The Bay and its director of habitat restoration, Wenley Ferguson, have been working with the city for a dozen years to make Easton’s Beach more resilient to the climate crisis and flooding.
In 2012, Ferguson led a pilot program to add beachgrass. It wasn’t easy to find a place to plant. The barrier spit was and still is dominated by concrete, asphalt, and buildings in various stages of defeat.
Ferguson and her team eventually decided on a narrow strip on the north side of the property, between the parking lot and Memorial Boulevard, that was dominated by random nonnative grasses.
Six months later, after Easton’s Beach took a pounding from Superstorm Sandy, the April plantings held. The nonnative grasses and bald areas — not so much.
“The beachgrasses we planted caught the blowing sand, and to the west of that area where we hadn’t planted, storm surge went through and scoured out an area,” Ferguson recently told me. “It was a real night-and-day kind of comparison. You restore a little bit of habitat and look what this habitat can do with regard to increasing resilience.”