Amy Lee

Written By Adam Huss

Solving Wine’s Biggest Problem

OOM co-founders Emily Chae (left) and Amy Lee (right)

This is a special episode. More than an episode, it’s a direct request to all of you listening right now. Here’s the request: let’s solve the glass bottle problem right now.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast recently, the name OOM should be familiar to you. They’re a sponsor of this podcast, and they are a company based here in my fair city that is tackling the bottle re-use challenge head on. They have begun collecting, de-labeling, cleaning and sanitizing wine bottles to re-sell. They’ve encountered some problems that they can’t solve on their own… they need you. Or really, we all need each other. As you listen to this conversation with OOM co-founder Amy Lee, you’ll see what I mean. Amy wants OOM to help eliminate single use packaging across all industries.

The scope of this conversation is mainly focused on California, but this is a conversation that needs to happen and is happening everywhere. The reason I wanted to get this conversation out to you is because any of us trying to do this anywhere will encounter the same problems, and sharing these problems and their potential solutions as a global community of winemakers and wine lovers will move all of these efforts forward toward solutions much more quickly.

The main issues come down to two things that all of us listening can help make happen: first, we need to use label materials that can be removed without chemical processes, and second, we need to agree on just a handful of standard bottle shapes and colors that we all use if we buy new glass.

Why do we need to do this? Why is this conversation not only important, but urgent? Because glass is far and away the biggest source of emissions for the wine industry, and re-using bottles can drastically reduce the emissions associated with producing and using new glass.

Also, most wine bottles do not get recycled in the US. Those of you listening in Europe do much better with your recycling, but in the US we recycle less than 31% of our wine bottles. And the bad news about recycling glass is that it produces a lot of emissions to heat glass to close to 3000 degrees Fahrenheit so that it can be re-molded.

NY Times Article on the Woeful State of Wine Bottle Recycling

Tablas Creek Blog Article on Wine Bottle Recycling & Climate Change

My hope is that those of you listening now can choose to alter your bottle and label purchasing behavior immediately to begin to facilitate a transition to a re-use system. If you’re not a wine producer, tell your favorite producers about this opportunity. Let them know you’d like them to embrace these bottling choices and that you’d not only be okay with it, you’d love it. If you’re a wine maker, get everyone at your custom crush onto the same bottles and labels. Spread this podcast and this message to everyone you know in wine. Because it will take all of us, and we’ll need to work with the glass producers too.

Bottle Skus for New Purchase at Ardagh

I was at a local wine fair yesterday here in Los Angeles for natural wine producers. I think every producer and supporter there was philosophically receptive to this kind of change, but what was lacking was a moment in the center of that event where someone called everyone in attendance to attention and rallied us all together as community of like-minded individuals who have a lot of power to make that change happen, and appeal to us to take action to make this happen. This is that appeal.

And if you are hosting or organizing an event or know someone who is, please consider structuring that moment into your festival. Whether it’s to instigate action to create a bottle re-use program, or a three-minute appeal to make any other change happen that we desperately need to make, I’m beginning to feel like these festivals are missed opportunities to do something important.

We have linear systems in place right now. Linear systems can only exist if we assume the earth’s resources are infinite, if we assume that we can continue to take without giving back. We all know this assumption is tragically wrong – linear systems all have dead ends, and so it’s time to set up a new circular system based on the assumption that our world and its resources are precious and finite and require us to give back on the same level at which we take. This conversation is about how we start to do that.

Please support this podcast by joining our Patreon community.

A big thanks to our current Patreon subscribers for making this podcast, and this change, possible.

Adam Huss
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