Community Benefits

We guarantee that when you buy our bottles each one is prepared with as much love & care as the wine that refills them.

Boutèy is on a mission to disrupt the packaging industry in Canada by creating a circular economy for glass wine bottles, and in the process jobs for those who have barriers to employment.

Sustainability & a Circular Economy

British Columbia has an impressive recovery rate (97%) for glass.  Glass collected by Recycle BC is sold to end markets in BC to be sent downstream to a United States glass plant for new bottles, with the remainder processed into sandblast material or construction aggregate in BC. 

To move one ton of glass bottles from China to an Okanagan winery in Oliver creates 678 pounds of CO2

Every ton of recycled glass contains 1,300 pounds of sand, 410 pounds of soda ash and 380 pounds of limestone.

This means every glass wine bottle collected by the recycling program is only used once. See their annual report for more information. (Link below)

Every bottle reused 5 times reduces its carbon footprint by 30%.

Save 82,000 bottles (or 0.05% of VQA wine sales) from being destroyed, reintroduce them into the system and we can eliminate 170,000 Kg of C02 from being produced.

The Circular Economy

Wine bottles will change the world is Good Goods’ claim and they predict that we are in the early stages of a shift away from from disposable consumer goods to reusables. The World Economic Forum projects that between 20–40% of single-use packaging will become part of the reusable economy by 2030. (Link below)

Mature Bottle Reuse Systems

The paper: Analyzing the environmental sustainability of glass bottles reuse in an Italian wine consortium demonstrates “…that the winemaking sector is energy-intensive… 30% to packaging and bottling phases, while the remaining 10% is due to storage and auxiliary activities as offices, general heating, air conditioning, lighting, etc. Therefore, the packaging and bottling phases, besides being very important for the conservation and the quality of the wine, are responsible for high energy consumption, high waste production and significant environmental impact.” (Check out the link below for more info)

Sterilization

Similar to the procedures for sterilizing medical equipment, wine bottles are cleaned, disinfected and sanitized at high temperatures. Learn more about how they have been doing it at Molson’s brewery for decades. (Link below)