NAPA COUNTY, Calif. (KCBS RADIO) – Some Bay Area wineries may soon ask customers to return their wine bottles after drinking in an effort to cut costs and prioritize sustainability.
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The price of a wine bottle has doubled in the past two years, but a Sonoma County startup, Conscious Container, believes it has a solution: reusable wine bottles.
"Around the world, refillable glass systems are the norm," the company states on its website. "It is clear that they deliver a more sustainable solution and bring down packaging costs for producers."
Founder and CEO Caren McNamara was tired of throwing away perfectly good glass bottles.
"This is about taking a beverage container, in our case glass, and that glass bottle is filled out into the marketplace, it comes back, it's washed and it’s refilled another time," McNamara told KCBS Radio. "These systems exist around the world. They're very profitable, they're also very sustainable and we don't have that here in the United States."
McNamara said, initially, a handful of wineries will redirect excess wine bottles to her company to be cleaned then distributed to smaller wineries at a discounted price. Eventually, Conscious Container's program will set their sights on retail wine customers to return their bottles at Bay Area drop off locations.
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