New York wineries: Reusable wine bottles under discussion

Was a time when milk was delivered to the door by a guy in a blue-gray jumpsuit, glass bottles clinking as he made his way up the driveway. He might have had an old-timey name like Barney or Clarence or Harry.

Some days, if it was the end of a morning run, he might stop in, sit at the kitchen table and spend a few minutes over a cup of coffee. When the milk was gone a few days later, the thick glass bottles were left in a bin by the door for pickup and cleaning. They were refilled and replaced, and the cycle continued.

Glass bottles were reused over and over, when recycling wasn’t a thing yet but everyone did some form of it. (Like washing cloth diapers.) That changed when the milk industry and consumers largely abandoned glass bottles in favor of plastic and paperboard.

Attention in this century has shifted to the amount of planet-warming carbon that goes into making new bottles. Millions of tons of hard-to-recycle glass end up in landfills. The state of New York has been considering recycling an old idea, and it’s spending millions of dollars to find out if it will work.

Except not with milk — but wine.

Here's how this might work.

New York wineries would agree to bottle their wine in a standard, one-size-for-all bottle, slightly heavier than most bottles. Once emptied, they’d be returned. (Absent the milkman, how that would happen is a little tricky. More on that later.) The bottles would be washed in a facility near the wineries, racked and delivered back to the wineries for refill.

Some Finger Lakes wineries began studying the idea a few years ago, around the time state lawmakers said they wanted to update the state’s 40-year-old Bottle Bill by adding some wine bottles to a list of containers eligible for redemption. They fear the move could end up costing more money than a reusable program.

Pete Saltonstall, the owner of Treleaven Wines in King Ferry, enlisted three teams of Cornell University grad students to study the idea after his daughter, a marine researcher whose work focuses on how climate change impacts coral reefs, reminded him how much carbon enters the atmosphere from glass production.

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Among the teams’ findings was that the environmentally conscious might pay a few dollars more for a reusable bottle while the budget-conscious likely wouldn’t return them unless there was an incentive.

But Saltonstall thinks there could be an upside for his business, especially in parts of the state where the future of the environment is an everyday concern. “I was talking to my daughter about it and said, ‘you know we could put a really good positive marketing spin on this, and I think people would respond to it,’” Saltonstall said. “We can talk about how much energy we’re saving reusing this glass.”

Treleaven sells around 13,000 cases of wine every year.

In 2020, the state Department of Environmental Conservation awarded Alfred University researchers $4.2 million to study wine bottle reuse as well as other glass reuse initiatives like using crushed glass to make the cement used in sea walls.

As the DEC sees it, a bottle reuse program would reduce the roughly 7.6 million tons of glass that ends up in the nation’s landfills every year. And it would cut down on pollutants in the air since roughly 60% of the wine industry’s carbon footprint comes from new bottles.

It’s part of a wider mission to create a circular economy while lessening New York’s reliance on landfills by reducing the amount of paper, plastic and glass that ends up in them. In June, a bill that would have forced big business to reduce the amount of plastic they use in packaging failed to make it to an Assembly vote after succeeding in the Senate.

Towns in the Finger Lakes are pushing back against proposals to expand landfills that take in thousands of tons of municipal waste every day, much of it trucked up from New York City. Nearly 40% of the state’s solid waste goes to landfills, and most of them are located upstate.

They are towering reminders that some 40 years later the state has failed to achieve the goal it established then of reducing, reusing or recycling its waste stream by 50%. The state’s recycling rate of around 20% is below the national average of 32%, despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent.

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Alfred, a national leader in glass science research, has focused its study on 130 wineries in the Finger Lakes, which on average use 10,000 wine bottles in tasting rooms alone every year, some as many as 50,000.

The first challenge has been figuring out how to clean the bottles. Wine can settle under the surface of glass, which means scents stick around longer.

Researcher Arron Potter likens it to a pickle jar. Even after you wash it, it still smells like pickles. The same goes for wine. The trouble is while milk might smell like milk and pickles like pickles, a Riesling doesn’t smell like a Chardonnay, Merlot doesn’t smell like Cabernet Sauvignon and … you get it.

His idea is to use sodium hydroxide to remove a microscopically thin layer of glass from the bottle to eliminate residue.

“I think if we use a relatively tough cleaning technique, I’m pretty confident that we’ll be able to get all the scent out,” said Potter, a postdoctoral researcher in Alfred’s Center for Glass Innovation.

“It’s really about, can we figure out logistics and cost because I think ultimately most wineries are happy to do this if the cost works out,” he adds. “If the cost doesn’t work out then it doesn’t matter how clean we get the bottles.”

The next step would be setting up a washing facility in the Finger Lakes and perhaps another on Long Island, regions with a thriving local wine industry. It would act sort of like a dry cleaner, with bottles dropped off at the facility. But getting them there — not to mention getting them there undamaged — is the tricky part.

In interviews with Cornell students, consumers suggested it’s unlikely they would drive back to the winery to return their empties. Most of us would rather not be bothered.

Perhaps the bottles could be retrieved from redemption centers that already take in bottles of beer, soda and water? Or users could drop them at a reverse vending machine in a local supermarket, maybe one with a soft-landing feature so glass won’t chip or shatter?

Then there’s the bottle problem. Branding. It's part of the wine-drinking experience. At a nice restaurant, you watch the server open the bottle and pour.

The bottle is a selling point. Experts will tell you the bottle's shape says something about the quality of the wine inside or maybe the region where it originated. Some of us just see a bottle and a price tag. Would wineries risk alienating a slice of their market and agree to a standard green bottle?

Alfred’s research has focused on reusing tasting room bottles, less than 10% of most wineries' bottle output. There will be more hurdles to overcome with a full-scale program.

“People are going to have to deal with scuffed bottles a lot more and the aesthetics of the bottles are going to hurt no matter what,” said Collin Wilkinson, the director of Alfred’s Center for Glass Innovation.

“And how much does that actually affect the resale value?” he added. “I’ve heard somebody claim that it increases the resale value because people feel better about buying environmentally green bottles, but I’m not convinced that’s true for all consumers or even a significant portion of consumers.”

Rebecca Welch, a visiting scholar who’s part of the Alfred team, said beer consumers have responded well to return and reuse programs in Canada because they have a sense they’re helping the environment.

But the consumption habits of beer drinkers might not be the same as wine drinkers. Welch isn't sure that an idea that worked in North America on beer could jump the gap to the wine industry and its customers.

By Alfred researchers' calculations, the break-even point — when washing and reusing becomes more cost effective than buying new ones — is 40,000 bottles per month.

The average price of a new bottle is a little more than $1. Washing and reusing would cost wineries 10 cents a bottle depending on the level of participation.

The more wineries that participate the lower the washing cost. Who picks up the tab for the washing facility? Alfred estimates construction costs of around $900,000.

Some are hoping the state would kick in by rewarding the wineries’ participation in bottle washing with financial incentives. And they think in the long run it may cost them less if the state next year passes a law that adds wine bottles to the list of containers eligible for a 10-cent redemption.

“Many wineries believe that bottle reuse could only end up less expensive than dealing with deposits and returns, but also more effective at reducing waste, especially if it can be done on a regional basis rather than by individual wineries,” said Steve Bate, the executive director of New York’s Wine Policy Institute.

Wineries surveyed by Alfred pegged their average annual budget for bottle purchases between $100,000 and $150,000.

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Finger Lakes wineries have been studying a program that began in April in Oregon’s Willamette Valley run by a company called Revino. Revino says it’s signed up 44 wineries in the region, first by getting them to use their green bottles marked “Refillable.” Their advertising suggests their bottles could be reused up to 50 times. That's milk bottle territory.

Revino’s in the process of securing funding for a washing facility which they hope to have up and running later this year or early next. Co-founder Keenan O’Hern said the idea has caught on in an industry that’s looking to appeal to sustainable consumers. “The United States is really the only industrialized country that hasn’t had commercial-scale reuse for the last few decades ... .” O’Hern said. “We’ve tried recycling. We’ve tried it for the last 25, 30 years. We pounded that into the ground. We’ve spent billions of dollars.”

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The message? Recycling hasn't worked so well, why not try reuse?

Vinny Aliperti, the owner of Billsboro Winery in Geneva, likes the idea and expects most wineries would participate once they got comfortable with protocols and sterilization. He’s been doing his part to keep his bottles out of landfills by turning them over to recycling firms. In recent months he reached out to a Binghamton-based startup called KLAW Industries that takes glass bottles and grinds them into fine sand to make cement.

“My feeling with environmental issues and sustainability issues is while everyone says ‘it’s great, it’s great,’ you’ve got to make it as simple as possible or people just don’t do it,” Aliperti said. “They won’t.”

Take a look at your recycling bin. He may have a point.

Thomas C. Zambito covers energy, transportation and economic growth for the USA Today Network’s New York State team. He’s won dozens of state and national writing awards from the Associated Press, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Deadline Club and others during a decades-long career that’s included stops at the New York Daily News, The Star-Ledger of Newark and The Record of Hackensack. He can be reached at [email protected].