Sun, sea, sangria and . . . crushed glass? Officials in Florida have come up with the sharp idea of using recycled glass to replenish denuded beaches. The glass grains would be mixed with sand and sprinkled on the shore. But you won’t get splinters in your flip-flops: sand and glass are both made from silica.

“Basically, what we’re doing is taking the material and returning it back to its natural state,” says Phil Bresee, the recycling manager for Broward County. It means less stuff going into landfill, and the production of a commodity – sand – that is genuinely needed.

Broward County is estimated to make $1 billion a year from its 24 miles of beaches. But it is getting more expensive to replace the sand that is washed away. New sand is dredged from the ocean floor and piped to shore. Regulations to protect offshore reefs, however, have pushed dredging sites farther out to sea.

Between 1991 and 2005, dredging costs more than doubled to about $20 million (£9.9 million) per million tonnes of sand. Recycling would produce only a fraction of the sand needed – about 16,000 tonnes a year – but it is regarded as a useful stopgap for the worst erosion sites.

The idea has provenance. Two ocean dump sites for glass – one off California and one off Hawaii – resulted in the glass being assimilated into the sand.

Beaches in New Zealand and the Caribbean have also used recycled glass.

Some, however, are concerned that adding pulverised glass may have unforeseen effects on shoreline ecosystems.

Whether the plan is put into action now depends on an experiment to see what happens when the glass mixes with surf; there’s still a chance that Floridians will bottle out of the idea.