Encinitas Puts Faith in a Glass Dream to Save Its Beaches : Environment: Initial studies find Leucadia man’s idea to use crushed glass as sand substitute a real possibility.

The synthetic-sand beaches that once gleamed in the dreams of a Leucadia lawn-mower salesman are moving into the realm of the possible.

Preliminary studies by geologists working for the city of Encinitas show that crushed glass recyclables seem to make a decent substitute for real sand, but the final results aren’t in yet. Finely crushed glass looks like sand and feels like sand, the geologists said, but environmental and financial questions still must be answered.

“Technically, yes, it has a reasonable chance of supplementing sand. It looks almost identical to beach sand, unless you look at it under a microscope,” said Dave Schug, a coastal geologist with Woodward-Clyde Consultants in San Diego. “But by no means are you going to see recycled glass all up and down the beach. At least not in the foreseeable future.”

Their report is due by the end of December.

If the eagerly awaited study says yes, Encinitas could one day become the first city in the nation, geologists say, to have a beach of glass to shore up its eroded coast.

“It looks like very colorful beach sand,” said Steve Sachs, a senior planner with the San Diego Assn. of Governments, whose shoreline erosion committee looks favorably on the new use for recycled glass. “It looked and felt pretty much like sand to me. . . . Everyone likes the idea.”

It was the vision of Dan Dalager of Leucadia, and his impressive bucket of home-made sand, that led to the City Council this summer to commission the $8,000 analysis of the sand.

“We’ll be able to redo the beaches here in Encinitas and make them totally bitchin,’ ” Dalager said. “My guess is there’s not going to be enough glass to do every beach in Southern California.

“The engineers told me, ‘At first we thought you were really stupid, but now we think it’s going to work,’ ” said Dalager, 42, who sits on the Parks and Recreation commission and co-owns a lawn-mower store. “To me, it’s just so simple, so stupid, so easy.”

But geologists scrutinizing the fake sand are reluctant to promise it will be the savior that beach lovers and imperiled bluff-dwellers are praying for.

Although the Dalager sand is a convincing imitation, any number of factors could foil the project, including the production cost and the availability of recycled glass, Schug said.

But the biggest hurdle, said Schug, promises to be environmental. What if recycled glass contains contaminants that the study has yet to detect? Will the wildlife that thrives in normal sand accept the faux sand as a habitat?

“We haven’t been able to find a case where this has been tried before,” he said. “A lot of things can happen when you start changing or adding to external conditions.”

Key questions about the Dalager sand will probably be answered over the next month of the study. But even more questions are expected to emerge if the city goes on to seek approval from the multitude of governmental agencies that would have to approve it.

But if next month’s report is positive, an experimental beach of Dalager sand might be set up as soon as next year. The tentative plan, said a city official, is to rope off a swath of Moonlight Beach and see how the sand behaves.

Excited city officials almost started a test beach last December--they even had a truck of sand loaded and ready--but then held off because of concerns about public safety.

“We thought, golly-gee-whiz, we don’t probably know enough about this to unload it on a public beach,” said former City Councilwoman Anne Omsted. “Calmer heads prevailed.”

Although chemically, glass is close to natural sand--both are primarily made of silica, a hard, glassy mineral--scientists wonder how the sand grains would withstand the pounding of the waves.

Because glass is less durable than natural sand, the grains are expected to wear down into extremely fine granules. But some fear they could break down at angles and become sharp, exposing residents to sore feet and the city to a huge liability.

“I’d also be really interested to find out what the public perception is of this,” Schug said. “Do people want to know when you walk down the beach you’re walking through a bunch of crushed bottles?”

But Dalager imagines visitors flocking to Encinitas to romp on the fake beach. In the process, they’d ignite the city’s tourist industry. All thanks to discarded bottles.

“They’ll want to pose on it and take photos,” he said. “Just because it’s unique.”

During the past 30 years, North County beaches have slipped away as development choked off the rivers and streams that supplied them. Storms scoured away much of the sand that remained, exposing the bare rock.

The sand loss is particularly dramatic in Encinitas, Schug said. There, in the absence of a beach buffer, the waves have eaten away at the cliff bases, jeopardizing bluff-top homes.

Although it controls the several-mile stretch of beach from Swamis to Ponto, the city fortifies only Moonlight Beach, the only beach that doesn’t virtually disappear at high tide.

And the cost is high. Last year, the city spent more than $25,000 on 1,200 tons of sand for the beach, a quantity that added one foot of sand to a narrow, roughly 150-foot swath of the beach.

To make any meaningful improvement, using glass would be astronomically expensive. But if the glass sand is safe, city officials believe recyclers will give them huge quantities of it for free in hopes that a massive market would emerge for recyclers’ stockpiles of old glass.

Meanwhile, Omsted said all of San Diego County’s coastal cities have expressed “surprising amount of interest” in the sand project and are waiting for the study’s outcome.

“The potential payoffs are very high for the glass industry and the coastal cities that are losing sand,” Omsted said. “If this works, it’s going to be a big story. We will have found a way of getting rid of a negative in our society and dealing with a deficit in our sand.”

Nevertheless, other governmental agencies have held off on supporting the project. Omsted said neighboring coastal cities turned down her request to help Encinitas pay for the study and the county rejected Sandag when it sought a grant to fund the study.