What Can I do with Empty Wine Bottles?
Empty wine bottles are a problem for anyone who drinks a considerable amount of wine. What can be done with them? Are there places that can take and recycle wine bottles or can they be useful in some other way?
If you have ever thrown away a trash bag full of wine bottles after a dinner party, I’m sure you have asked yourself these very questions. In reality, you can recycle these wine bottles in a couple of different ways.
Check with Your Local Beer and Wine Store:
There are two ways that a store like this can be helpful. First, a local beer and wine store may take in recycled wine bottles, which provide a hefty amount of reusable glass, to be later given to a nearby recycling plant. This will save our landfills from approximately 25,000 tons of wasted reusable glass. If that local store does not have such an agreement, find out if the owner knows anyone who is interested in your bottles as a means to bottle their own wine. That bottler will be grateful for the opportunity to sterilize and reuse bottles rather than buy new ones every time he or she needs them.
If that does not work for you, then try a local grocery store. Quite often, grocery stores have recycling bins out front where you can simply drop in your wine bottles and no longer have to feel guilty about wasting glass that could be reused. Barring that, let your fingers do the walking in your local phone book and call a recycling company to simply ask, “hey, what can I do with my wine bottles”. Or, search the Internet for viable options in your area.
Other Options:
Other than that, you can create a bottle tree in the southern tradition in your yard as a good luck charm and decoration, cut the tops off of the wine bottles with a glass cutter and create pretty pots for your plants or vases for your flowers, break the bottles and create those increasing popular glass mobiles out of the different shapes and colors, or simply use shards to create a mosaic table or pot.
There are a variety of things that those old empty wine bottles are useful for. Back in the mid-twentieth century, a man in Pocatello, Idaho even created an entire garage by mortaring beer and wine bottles together to create walls. If recycling can’t work for you, then take a page out of his creative book and created something uniquely yours out of your wine bottles.
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