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Wine Bottles Born Again Plant sanitizes, sorts bottles for re-use by Midwestern vintners raverse City, Mich.—Despite concert- ed efforts from the glass industry to encourage the recycling of bottles and other glass packaging, a sizeable proportion still ends up in landfills instead. Lisa Carl- son, a nurse and entrepreneur in Traverse City, Mich., believes that only 30%-40% of wine, beer and Champagne bottles are actually recycled. With some 29 wineries currently operat- ing in Traverse City and nearby Leelanau County (and 118 throughout Michigan, according to WinesVinesDATA), Carlson decided to provide an alternative. Last year she opened Evergreen Bottle Co., which collects and sanitizes used bottles, then makes them available for re-use by the originating wineries or others. The concept is not new, but it has not previously been available in the Midwest. Most bottles arrive at Evergreen in large T Arton_Jan11.qxp 12/7/10 2:43 PM Page 1 pallet boxes, and then they are sorted by types and colors. "The large number of vine- yards in the Grand Traverse area simplified a lot of the sorting," Carlson said. "There are many that use the same bottles for a variety of different wines. Rieslings, for example, are very common in this region; so is the use of an amber, green or golden-brown Riesling bottle." Currently, Evergreen has some 90,000 bottles in stock. Carlson recently took delivery of a new $100,000 sanitizing machine from Ohio- based Niagara Systems LLC. "It works marvelously," she said. The glass bottle industry supports bottle- refilling efforts. Jay Scripter, VP of sustain- ability for manufacturer Owens-Illinois, pointed out, "The benefits of refilling are pretty immense. With the refillable model, if a bottle is used 20-30 times, it can drop the carbon footprint to zero." He noted, too, that new technology can sense contaminants within bottles, to assuage any concerns about purity. —Jane Firstenfeld Wines & Vines MARCH 2011 45 WineEast