Why We Recycle/Repurpose Wine Bottles and Why No One Else Does.
In October 2019, Bunker Hill Vineyard and Winery (BHV) crossed a historic threshold. With help from our amazing customers, we have recycled/repurposed over 100,000 wine bottles! Through our grassroots effort, what all of us have accomplished is way more than any other winery in the U.S.A. has been able or willing to achieve. By recycling these wine bottles with your help, we have been able to accomplish an enormous amount to help the environment.
This means we were able to:
Reduce mining waste by over 7,000 lb.
Reduce air pollution by over 500 lb.
Save enough electricity to operate over 33,000 TV sets for over 1 hour each.
Save enough electricity to power 100 watts of home lighting for 100,000 homes.
Reduce BHV’s carbon footprint by over 60%.
We are so happy with the progress we have made alongside all of our customers and will continue to care deeply about the world around us, our friends, family, and neighbors. Thank you for all of your help and support!
Every year in the U.S.A., we go through approximately 36 million cases of wine. This means that about 4 billion wine bottles are dumped into our landfills and forgotten. Because glass wine bottles are inorganic, it takes almost 1 million years for each one to decompose. Even though BHV is the Greenest Winery in America and uses 100% recycled wine bottles, we are not alone in the world. Every winery throughout Europe recycles their empty wine bottles a minimum of 9 times!
So why isn’t every winery in Florida and the U.S.A. recycling and repurposing their own wine bottles? For the first 5 years that BHV was open, we took in empty wine bottles from every other Florida winery and cleaned, sanitized, and repurposed them. The hope was that we could lead by example and set a recycling standard for the nation. Unfortunately, that never happened.
Today, we no longer accept wine bottles from other Florida wineries. We feel that if you have leftover bottles from other Florida wineries, you should return their empty wine bottles to them to recycle.
