with the Bottle Bill infrastructure, but also it has to do with Metro fighting for a separate glass bin, at least in the greater Portland region. “We have advocated for it and required local governments to separate glass because of the material quality issue,” says Metro’s Greene. Even in Seattle, which is in a Bottle- Bill state, residents throw their glass into a mixed-recycling bin. “As you can imagine, when all the materials go to a MRF [Materials Recovery Facility], it’s hard to pull out glass from paper when it’s wet,” Greene says. “There are issues when it’s commingled and getting that material out of it.” When people throw everything from soiled food containers to used Keurig pods into the commingled bin, the glass ends up in a sorry state. So in states that don’t have a separate sorting mechanism for glass, the dirtier glass from MRFs ends up as cover for landfills (literally, a top layer to keep other trash from blowing away), according to Peter Spendelow, a natural-resource specialist at the DEQ. “That’s a pretty worthless use,” he says. The clean stream of glass OBRC and trash haulers supply to companies like Glass to Glass means that most of Oregon’s glass actually gets recycled and not thrown into landfills. According to the DEQ, about 70% of Oregon’s population has access to curbside recycling and another 13% has access to depots only, where people can drop off their recycling. That leaves 17% of Oregonians who don’t have convenient access to glass recycling of any kind. In those remote corners of the state — places like Malheur or Lake counties — it’s likely that most people’s trash ends up in the landfill. (These figures do not include Bottle Bill glass, which OBRC collects weekly in all parts of the state.) The consistency of recycling across the state will improve when the new Recycling Modernization Act goes into effect in 2025. Passed during the 2021 Oregon legislative session, the RMA is a producer- responsibility law that will require the formation of producer-responsibility organizations (PROs) that will be responsible for making sure their packaging materials are recycled in “responsible end markets.” (Rule-makers are still working out how to enforce this.) The RMA will expand recycling services across the state, upgrade recycling facilities, and create a uniform statewide collection list so that whether you live in Burns or Astoria, the same materials will be collected for recycling. In November, rule-makers at the DEQ approved a uniform statewide collection list. O ne of the things that makes glass superior as a packaging type is that it can be recycled an infinite amount of times. “There’s not a maximum amount of times glass bottle can be remelted,” says Hippert at O-I. But even better for the environment than recycling glass is refilling it, which you can do up to 50 times. In 2018 OBRC launched a refillable bottle program for beer bottles. “Because of our high redemption rate, and our vertically integrated system, we have a high degree of confidence that they’d come back into our system,” says Chambers at OBRC. OBRC created two custom bottles (12 ounce and 500 ml, both made by O-I) embossed with the words “Bottle Drop” and debossed with the words “Refillable” and “Please return.” Right now they have 11 partners, mostly brewers, including Double Mountain, Gigantic, Ancestry and Buoy. They even have two winemakers — Pierce Wines and Coopers Hall Wine — and one cidermaker, Röder Apfelwein. Collectively, these 11 partners have 137 individual SKUs in the OBRC system totaling 2.8 million refillable bottles. While that’s a small percentage of the overall market, it’s the only statewide refillable-bottle program in the nation. For Chambers, this pilot project is proof of concept. One of the biggest evangelists for refillable bottles (and also OBRC’s first refillable partner) is Matt Swihart of Double Mountain Brewery in Hood River. He’s done his homework. Experts he’s interviewed say that not only do refillable glass bottles have a 90% lower carbon footprint than single-use bottles, they are far superior to aluminum cans, which rely on bauxite (a rock that needs to be strip-mined from the earth) and are lined with plastic. Finally, he says, beer out of glass bottles tastes better, because less oxygen gets in during the bottling process. On the OBRC website, Swihart explains a big perk of the refillable-bottle program during COVID: “During the pandemic, almost every brewer I knew was panicking [about] package supplies with shortages of both aluminum and glass,” Swihart said on the OBRC site. “But we’ve been great with a bunch of stock in Clackamas, so we haven’t had major interruptions or changes in pricing.” The same supply-chain issues hit the wine industry. Chinese-made wine bottles were either stuck in ports or delayed due to pandemic shutdowns, which meant, in many cases, that U.S. winemakers couldn’t bottle their wine. A new venture has sprung up to offer a local refillable wine bottle program here in Oregon — at a much larger scale. Keenan O’Hern and Adam Rack are the passionate duo behind Revino, which will be introducing a refillable wine bottle in the Willamette Valley in 2024. There are many reasons why winemakers want refillable bottles: One, they want a reliable supply of locally made glass. (The Revino bottle will be made by O-I.) Others want the bottles for environmental reasons. That’s the case for Donna Morris and Bill Sweat at Winderlea Vineyard & Winery, who have been working to find a lighter bottle. (The heavier the bottle, the higher the carbon emissions.) In 2006, when they made their first vintage, their bottles were 830 grams. 29
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