Ontario winery to resuse bottles

You know, logistically, it’s there’s a lot going on when you want to wash a glass bottle, you know, you have the supply coming in, you have it being sold to consumers and you have to have a way to collect those bottles back. And then do the work that Tyler does, which is removing the labels, the capsule, cleaning the outside of the bottle, cleaning the inside of the bottle, get it repacked and back to the consumer. And, you know, and kind of where we are in the Western world with commercialization, you know, usually we just go to the path of least resistance, which is virgin glass just comes your door and you’re paying a fairly, you know, reasonable price. To get it. And so the thought of going through all this extra step is for a lot of, you know, companies like, well, why would I do that? I have the bass right there on my doorstep. But you know, with our sustainable mindset and we kind of, you know, have to start asking questions, you know, what can we continue to go down this path while we’re using these bottles once and then they’re sometimes being recycled, but usually not being reused almost ever. Wine is is second last use of the bottle and after that it’s being used into fiberglass and things like that. So. So Tyler, let’s get to the the process here. Explain the process that that circular takes with a used wine bottle. We’re in a pretty early pilot stage. You know, this has never really been done before in Ontario. So we’re doing it in a pretty bootstrapped sort of guerrilla way. How we did it with Stratos and we had conversations I think over two years ago now about how we wanted to do this and it was something we wanted to pursue. So basically Dean and the Stratus team started collecting bottles from their tasting room, just the bottles that they pour for events and for folks coming to the winery to try the wines. Collected them overtime, stored them up until they had about 50 cases. You know, we went collected them. Our team handles like Dean said, it’s it’s pretty long process. So you know, removing the screw cap, first screw cap or a capsule like the metal covering at the top. And then there’s a couple different processes. We don’t really make bottles and and the industry isn’t really set up for reuse. So the labels that are on there are extremely, they’ve sort of been built up over years and years to be bulletproof pretty much to make sure that they don’t come off after, you know, a decade or two of aging. So. It’s a long process to get the labels off. Once the labels off, that’s, you know, the hard part done. So then we put it into an industrial bottle washing machine that washes the inside and the outside of the bottle. We dry it, pack it into boxes and then ship it back to Stratus. And then they get it the same way they would get bottles from there from their normal supplier, just in boxes, put them onto the line and then refill them.