A LOT OF BOTTLE
In our ongoing sustainability series, Sarah Heeringa meets everyday heroes helping us reach our 2030 climate goals.
When I was a kid, milk came in refillable bottles and by returning a few fizzy bottles to the local dairy, you’d earn enough to buy a paper bag of lollies for the walk back home.
Reuse is more than just a retrocool idea. Switching to reusable packaging for products like milk, wine and soft drinks would have a hugely positive impact on our very modern problems of excessive waste and carbon emissions.
Neil Pollett is a reuse champion. He’s the founder of Green Bottle New Zealand, a social enterprise creating a commercially viable way for drinks companies to switch from single-use or recyclable packaging to a refillable model.
“After we drink a glass of wine we wash the wine glass and reuse it as many times as we can. We don’t smash the wine glass. But that’s exactly what we do with the bottle the wine comes in,” says Pollett.
Glass is often described as ‘infinitely recyclable’, but the way our national waste collection currently operates, many bottles are not recycled as they either can't be sorted, or it's too costly to transport them to Visy Glass in Auckland, New Zealand’s only glass recycling facility.
Then there’s the huge amount of energy use and high emissions of glass manufacture. In 2020, Auckland’s glass factory produced 11,700 tonnes of carbon dioxide – the equivalent of more than 1650 return flights to London.
By contrast, reusing glass bottles reduces new glass production, conserves natural resources and lowers energy use. “A recycled glass bottle generates up to 20 times the carbon emissions of a washed one,” says Pollett.
Reusing glass bottles might seem obvious, but it’s the sort of thing that appears fiendishly challenging to achieve. To work commercially, it requires companies to adopt a certain amount of standardisation. For change at scale it needs support from major industry bodies
(such as New Zealand’s Packaging Council) and big business (such as supermarkets) who all have a vested interest in continuing with the status quo.
Pollett says it’s about expanding the choices around drinks packaging that are made available to us as consumers. “The burden of dealing with waste has been put on councils and the residents of every city, when it is actually dictated by the beverage companies who make these choices. You, as a consumer, currently have no choice about the products you love and what they are packaged in.”
To make the switch feasible, Green Bottle has invested in high-tech machinery that washes and inspects “reuse ready” glass bottles. “It basically ensures every bottle reused is as good as new,” says Pollett.
The machinery can process up to 20 million bottles a year, with capacity to expand as demand grows. Bottles are collected and returned using 100% recycled plastic crates. Participating companies use standardised bottles, and wash-off labels to differentiate their brand.
As Pollett points out, this happens already with around 80% of wines using the same bottles. “It’s the label that makes them look different,” he says.
The scheme is similar to one operating successfully statewide across Oregon, USA, and is “the sort of thing you find every week in Holland, Germany and elsewhere”. A 123-year-old local example are the classic wooden crates and refillable beer bottles from the Associated Bottlers C o( ABC).
Pollett believes the reusable bottle’s time has come. His work in refillables started in 2012 when two major New Zealand wineries explored it as an option for radically lowering their carbon footprint. Drawing on experience in packaging and the international drinks industry, Pollett concluded that the New Zealand market was not quite ready for such a step change. Instead he started the e-bike importing company Flux e-bikes.
Since then, there’s been a huge upswing in awareness and concern about packaging waste and climate emissions. Regional councils are also looking for waste and emission reduction solutions. “Reusing glass bottles is an important step on the journey to a zero-waste, circular economy,” says Parul Sood, Auckland Council general manager waste solutions.
In November 2023, Auckland Council and Green Bottle undertook a poll and a container return trial with 1000 Auckland residents. Drink Different Choose2Reuse participants received a crate for returning beverage containers and were surveyed on beverages and brands they were keen to see in reusable packaging. The new Waiōrea Community Recycling Centre provided a central place for picking up and dropping off crates.
Sood says Green Bottle’s initiative has the potential to change the mindset of consumers and manufacturers. “Recycling is definitely better than sending plastic or glass bottles to landfill, but reusing containers is the gold standard when it comes to packaging beverages.”