Ontario vineyard offers wine in reused bottles cleaned by Kitchener company

A vineyard in Niagara-onthe-Lake, Ont., has bottled a 2021 field blend wine in reused bottles for the first time.

Stratus Vineyards collabo‐ rated on the intiative with Circulr in Kitchener, Ont., a company that provides reusable packaging like jars for stores and other retailers.

Stratus gathered used wine bottles from customers and collected bottles from the winery's tasting room, then gave them to Circulr to figure out how to properly process them so they could be used again.

"This has never really been done before in On‐ tario," Circulr co-founder Tyler De Sousa said in an in‐ terview on CBC KitchenerWaterloo's The Morning Edi‐ tion.

"We had conversations, I think over two years ago now, about how we wanted to do this and it was some‐ thing we wanted to pursue."

Stratus collected 50 cases of bottles for Circulr to test.

They had to figure out what could be done with the screw caps, how to properly wash and sanitize the bottles and how to remove the labels.

"The labels that are on there ... they've sort of been built up over years and years to be bulletproof pretty much to make sure that they don't come off after a decade or two of aging. So it's a long process to get the labels off," he said.

"Once the label's off, the hard part is done."

WATCH | Ontario winery to resuse bottles:

European case study had promising results

Currently in Ontario wine bottles are recycled through blue bin systems or by peo‐ ple who return them to The Beer Store, which runs a re‐ cycling program.

The practice of reusing wine bottles is more popular in Europe. The group Zero Waste Europe reported in 2021 that as part of a reWINE case study, 82,239 glass bot‐ tles were reused by wineries, which saved an estimated 171,058 tonnes of CO2, which is the equivalent to the amount of emissions a car would produce while travel‐ ling 11 times around the wor‐ ld.

The case study was done in Spain by the company Rez‐ ero between 2016 and 2020 and involved 99 stakehold‐ ers, from wineries to stores and restaurants and munici‐ pal waste collection points.

Marta Beltran, project di‐ rector at Rezero, said in the 2021 release about the case study that the project "clearly shows the positive impact of wine bottle reuse on climate change mitigation and is key for the transition of the sec‐ tor towards zero waste."

But, Beltran added, in or‐ der to make wine bottle reuse successful there would need to be an investment in the tools to make it happen and government regulations

would need to be in place.

Advocacy group ap‐ plauds move

Reusing wine bottles is an idea Ashley Wallis applauds. She's the associate director of Environmental Defence, and the group wrote a paper in 2011 advocating for refill‐ able wine bottles in Ontario.

"Despite nearly 80 per cent of glass wine and liquor bottles being returned to The Beer Store through the province's highly successful deposit return program, these bottles have not up to this point been reused. This is a missed opportunity, and one we're happy to see local wineries, like Stratus, ad‐ dress," Wallis said in an email to CBC News.

She said it takes a lot of energy and resources to make products that are used briefly before they're thrown away.

"We need to massively re‐ duce the amount of singleuse products and packaging in our economy, and favour non-toxic, low-carbon reuse systems. Reusing glass wine bottles, at a regional or local level, is just the kind of initia‐ tive we need more of," she said.

Wallis also said there's no reason to stop at wine bot‐ tles. Environmental Defence has been calling on the province to broaden the de‐ posit return program to in‐ clude pop, juice and water containers since 2014, she said.

A broader program "would make it easier for companies to sell non-alco‐ holic drinks in reusable con‐ tainers, and keep billions of single-use bottles and cans out of our environment, landfills, and incinerators."

'Have to start asking questions'

Dean Stoyka is the wine‐ maker at Stratus Vineyards and says many wineries want to go on "the path of least re‐ sistance" and that's the usual way to recycling bottles.

"The thought of going through all these extra steps is, for a lot of companies like, well, why would I do that?" he said.

"With our sustainable mindset, we kind of have to start asking questions," he added. "Can we continue to go down this path where we're using these bottles once and then they're some‐ times being recycled, but usually not being reused al‐ most ever?"

Suzanne Janke is the es‐ tate director at Stratus Vine‐ yards and says reusing bot‐ tles is another step in their commitment to environmen‐ tal stewardship. The winery earned a LEED certification for their full facility in 2005 when it opened. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental design and is a global rating system that certifies green buildings.

"From that day forward, we've engaged in all kinds of different activities from the way we service our guests, the way we form the vine‐ yard, the way we make our wines in terms of being as mindful of the environment as possible, obviously, be‐ cause wine comes from the land," she said.

"We have a very obvious and inherent responsibility to make our work this way."

LISTEN | Kitchener com‐ pany Circulr works with stores, businesses to recy‐ cle jars:

'Something really big' Stoyka says they have plans to grow from 50 cases to 200 cases this year. He said they haven't found an al‐ ternative to the wine bottle that allows wine to age the same way, "so we're really married to the wine bottle."

Knowing that, he wants to see the idea of reusing bot‐ tles take off across the province.

"The idea is to grow it more and more with Circulr until we can maybe find a standardized bottle and get a bunch of wineries going on," he said.

"Ideally our entire produc‐ tion and all of Ontario - we have a really small, tight-knit community … we're kind of perfectly set up to sort of band together and take ini‐ tiative where there's bottles being used by the wineries."

De Sousa says he expects their Kitchener facility "is going to see a lot of bottles in the next 12 months" as more wineries and vineyards ex‐ press interest in the idea of reusing their bottles, too.

"There's a lot of interest in that movement," he said, adding Circulr has talked to two dozen wineries who seemed open to the idea of what the company is doing.

"We're kind of just getting our stuff together," he said, adding Stratus and Circulr are excited to "start the ball rolling on something really big."