Wine and spirits bottles had been exempt from California’s bottle deposit return program for decades. But in 2023, many distilleries were caught off guard by a change: Starting this year, consumers can redeem spirits and wine bottles at drop-off centers. Moreover, distilleries that make and/or sell spirits in California must add a new stamp to their labels and pay a producer fee into the CalReycle bottle program, just like soft drink and beer producers, beginning July 1, 2025. Consumers will pay an additional 10 cent deposit on a 750 mL liquor bottle, which they get back when they return the bottle. For most large distilleries, this change isn’t a big deal, just the cost of doing business in a time of climate change. For small craft distilleries, however, it could be a budget buster.
California’s change had me wondering: How does glass bottle recycling work, anyway? Most people assume the glass bottles they put in recycling bins end up as new bottles on store shelves a few weeks later. But is that true? And what’s the difference between states with a bottle return program like California versus those without, like where I live in Charlotte, North Carolina? To find answers, I bought a pair of steel-toed shoes to see if glass recycling is truly a circular economy.
Glass Bottles
According to the Glass Packaging Institute’s January 2023 Industry Report, more than 16.2 billion bottles and jars were shipped domestically in the first three quarters of 2022. That included 61 million spirits bottles, 31 million wine bottles, and 4 million bottles of non-alcoholic beverages. What happens to all those bottles has big implications for the planet, because even though it’s a non-toxic, natural substance, glass takes one million years to decompose — longer if it goes to a landfill.
Still, glass is closest to Earth’s perfect container material: inert, beautiful, natural, and infinitely recyclable. Once made, if handled properly, a glass bottle can be melted down and turned into a new bottle repeatedly, without any loss of integrity.
Is that happening in the U.S.? Not as much as it could. U.S. glass recycling rates are lower than aluminum or plastic and far below rates in Europe and Canada. Why? Because while reusing glass is straightforward, glass bottle recovery is extremely complex.
Glass: Square Pegs in the Circular Economy
I live in unincorporated Mecklenburg County outside Charlotte city limits. While Charlotte residents put glass bottles in their curbside bins, the company collecting my waste isn’t subject to city requirements and doesn’t accept glass. Therefore, to be a responsible citizen of Earth, when I finish a bottle of rum or pickles or salsa, I remove the lid, rinse the container, and store it in my garage. Once full, I drive it to a drop-off station 9.2 miles away. The station is in a neighboring county because the closest Mecklenburg one is 18 miles away.
This discrepancy between urban and suburban/rural glass collection is common across the country because glass is difficult to handle. It’s heavy and broken pieces are dangerous. Glass will scratch holes into sorting machines and cut through conveyor belts. People need heavy-duty personal protective equipment to touch it. These issues make glass recycling more difficult and expensive than aluminum or plastic.
Meet the MRF
The glass in Charlotte’s curbside bins goes to a plant called a Material Recovery Facility or MRF (pronounced “murph”). Like MRFs across the country, Mecklenburg’s separates single-stream recycling so that each material — plastic, paper, metal, glass — can be sent to either a second facility for additional processing or to a product manufacturer. I was able to see the process firsthand.
When curbside recycling arrives, it is loaded onto a conveyor belt where it runs by magnets to remove ferrous metals. Then it runs by two sensors separating non-ferrous items into two groups: two-dimensional objects (i.e. paper, called fiber in the industry) and three-dimensional objects (containers).
Since glass breaks in transport, the pieces are considered 2D and dropped onto metal trays called hoppers that vibrate to shake and break the contents. Using gravity, the heavier glass falls through 2-inch holes and onto another conveyor belt that runs by a giant fan blowing off lighter detritus, mostly bits of paper and plastic. What’s left becomes a new pile at the opposite end.
In the industry, glass pieces are called cullet, and cullet is what is used to make new glass. However, MRF cullet is considered “dirty” because it still has other stuff in it. From here it’s loaded into trailer trucks or railroad cars and sent to a second facility specifically for glass.
The Cullet Collector
I’m standing on a mound of MRF cullet two stories high near Wilson, North Carolina. The shiny pieces crunch below my steel-toed shoes, but I can see bits of paper and colorful plastic bottle caps. These giant mounds are outside Strategic Materials, Inc. (SMI), the largest handler of recycled cullet in the US. Plant Manager Kenton Moyer showed me the view.
“What you’re standing on we get from the MRF,” he said. “We make what’s inside the building from this, keeping all this glass out of the landfills. Glass that’s recycled for bottles, jars. Believe it or not, this is about 60 to 70 percent glass. It looks like 30, but we test every load.”
At SMI, MRF cullet goes through a second, similar sorting process involving more hoppers and conveyors. Moyer said the Wilson facility handles about 126,000 tons of material annually (about 600 tons a day) and roughly 78,000 tons of recycled glass goes out.
Once processed the MRF cullet is considered clean, but it may still not be clean enough for new glass bottles. Instead, it is used in a variety of products, things like fiberglass, sandblasting agents, reflective paint, and concrete. However, these products are “one and done” because the glass in them cannot be re-recovered. Single-stream cullet gets reused, just not in what the recycling industry calls “the highest, best use” of that material.
Coveting the Cullet
To see where SMI’s finished cullet ends up, I visited an O-I Glass manufacturing plant in Lexington, North Carolina. Owens-Illinois Glass of Ohio is the largest glass container manufacturer in the world with 70 plants in 19 countries, making the bottles and jars found in kitchen pantries everywhere. Plant manager Andrew Wolfe explained how they use recycled cullet.
Wolfe described glass making like baking a cake: The cullet is mixed with virgin raw materials of sand, soda ash, and limestone (the ingredients) and melted in a giant oven-like furnace. As the molten materials meld into glass, a monitoring system checks for things other than glass in the mixture. Some impurities — organic matter like paper labels and lime wedges — burn up without issues. Wolfe said his biggest concern is metal because it melts at a higher temperature than glass and can survive the furnace, which risks marring or discoloring the finished bottles.
Wolfe said the plant receives cullet from all over the eastern U.S., and every bottle his plant produces contains some recycled content. However, the clients’ needs dictate how much cullet is used, and each client’s bottle has its own “recipe.” Since most of the bottles they make are clear, non-MRF flint (clear) cullet is preferred, but he can’t get enough.
“We tend to struggle getting enough and it’s something we worry about quite a bit.” He added that since flint is the most desirable type, it’s also the most expensive. However, O-I’s clients want to show off their products in crystal clear bottles, so they find what they can.
“You’ll see in some of the piles,” said Wolfe as we walked along, “they’re not perfectly one color and you can get by with that in amber or green, but it’s harder to get by with that flint.” Where does this ‘clean cullet’ come from?
Wolfe said they receive the cleanest cullet from states with bottle bills.
The Circular Economy Full Circle
Bottle deposit return programs, aka bottle bills, began when Oregon passed the first legislation in 1971. These bills coincided with the development of the recycling industry as people noticed that food and beverage packaging was littering the planet. Currently 10 states have bottle bills (California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Vermont, plus the U.S. Territory of Guam).
These laws didn’t include liquor or wine bottles for several reasons. One, it was argued, was that since these bottles were bigger and heavier, they would be too cumbersome. Also, the vibrant craft distilling industry that we have today didn’t exist. Instead, lawmakers focused on what consumers purchased most back then: single-serving bottles of beer and soda. Another factor, plastic bottles were nascent back then because almost everything, even shampoo, was packaged in glass. Only one state included liquor bottles from the beginning – Iowa. Distilleries that make and/or sell spirits in Iowa already have a stamp on their bottles.
Producers in other states might say, “My state doesn’t need a bottle bill to get people to recycle.” Here’s the conundrum with bottles bills: When it comes to recycling outcomes, they work.
The 50 States of Recycling, an in-depth report issued in 2022 (updated 2023) by Eunomia Research & Consulting and Ball Corporation (an aluminum can manufacturer), ranked each state’s effectiveness in recycling beverage containers of all material types. Of the top ten recycling states, nine had bottle bills. In addition, these ten states had only 27 percent of the country’s population yet contributed 51 percent of all US beverage containers recycled.
Bob Hippert, sustainability strategy leader for manufacturing at O-I Glass, says that to continue to make the clear glass bottles that distilleries and other clients want, they need more clean cullet, which bottle bill states provide.
“The challenges that we have today are the lack of collection and then the lack of processing. There’s been a lack of investment in the U.S. over the last 10 years, really 10 to 15 years, to grow glass recycling with regards to cleaning up the glass and turning it from the single stream … to something that we can buy and the quality of material that we can put back into our furnaces.”
“We know that these types of [recovery] systems work,” Hibbert says. “Look at Europe. I was there last year and, in the discussions we had, their goal is trying to figure out how to get from 80 percent [glass] collection rates to 90. It blows my mind. If we were talking about this in the US, it’s how do we start?”
The Billion Bottle Question
All this led me to an important question: Does using recycled cullet lower the bottles’ cost?
The answer is not what distilleries want to hear: Maybe. Wolfe explained the greatest cost savings come from using less energy to heat the furnaces because cullet melts at a lower temperature than virgin materials. Wolfe added that since cullet has already undergone the chemical reactions associated with melting, using more cullet releases less CO2 in the air, which would help to slow climate change.
When I asked Hippert this question, he took a long pause before saying that while there could be some savings, he speculated that the rising costs of raw materials and labor would negate them.
Round and Round
The end result? Glass bottle recycling doesn’t always work the way most people think it does – an empty bottle goes into a bin becoming a new bottle somewhere else. Our existing hodge podge system relies on complicated factors that can succeed or fail at any point. I haven’t even delved into glass recycling’s costs.
Which brings me to one last question: What outcomes do we want from glass bottle recycling?
If the desired outcome is reusing glass, that’s happening. Every year millions of bottles are diverted from landfills and turned into new, useful products. However, if creating new glass containers from old ones is the desired outcome, that’s trickier because separating glass bottles from the single-stream — through consumer education, optical sorting equipment, and/or regulations like bottle bills — is the most effective way to recover cullet clean enough for bottle manufacturing.
The distilling industry has always prided itself on sustainability. I’ve visited distilleries across the country that have used profits to protect watersheds, used renewable energy to run facilities, and removed plastic straws and cups from tasting rooms. But I also know how much the industry covets those beautiful, crystal-clear bottles. When it comes to glass bottle recycling, have we buried our heads in the sand?
Ways to increase the recycling of your distillery’s bottles
• Learn how your community recycles and pass that information to your customers
Many consumers do what’s called ‘Wishful Recycling’ where they put what they think can be recycled into their single-stream bin and hope for the best. This includes things like food scraps and Styrofoam, which MRFs can’t handle. Drinking glasses, window panes, and glass bakeware can’t be put in recycling because they are made from different types of glass. Post recycling information in tasting rooms and on websites and social media. Consider partnering with the local environmental department to host “Recycle Right” seminars as part of a sustainability initiative.
• Become a glass drop-off station
Contact your waste management company or municipality’s solid waste department to find out how. For distilleries – especially rural areas with limited recycling — hosting a center will not only help your community recycle more but be a potential draw for customers. Residents can drop off their empties and buy new bottles to take home.
• Refill existing bottles
Most distilleries already refill tasting room bottles, but if yours doesn’t, please start. Some distilleries refill bottles for customers; however, check your local liquor laws because refilling bottles for resale might not be legal in some areas.
• Design bottles with recycling in mind
Consider using lightweight glass. Many brands believe a heftier bottle conveys a more premium product, but that extra weight is more energy-intensive to produce and costly to transport. Avoid metal foils on labeling, oversized or odd-shaped non-recyclable closures, and unusual bottle colors.
