Can wineries reuse their glass bottles? This woman thinks so…

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see the scale of the problem. You’ll find it on the island of Bocas del Toro, Panama, where Canadian Robert Bezeau has built an entire village out of abandoned plastic bottles, and offers vacations to learn about recycling, upcycling and ways to ‘atone’ for our plastic waste crimes.

It was Annie le Dneuff’s daughter Marianne, in 2018, who told her about Bezeau, and about a French man who was similarly raiding rubbish tips in France to build a castle from recycled glass bottles.

‘I had recently moved to Bordeaux, and it got me thinking about the mountains of glass bottles in the region that are thrown out every day’.

Even with recycling numbers increasing (around 61% in France, compared to 43% in the UK according to figures from Zero Waste Europe in September 2022), the process of turning that glass back into bottles has an environmental cost. With glass bottles coming under increasing scrutiny for their role in a wine estate’s carbon footprint, the question has become ever more pressing – and with increasing pressures in supply chains world over, and the energy crisis driving up production costs, solutions are needed.

‘Would it be possible,’ thought Annie, ‘to simply wash and reuse?’

Starting up
Le Dneuff was not the most obvious candidate for coming up with a solution. Born in Brittany, her career to date had involved selling stationary, teaching sales and marketing, and taking an extended break to raise her children, before moving to Bordeaux with her (soon to be ex) husband.

‘I had wanted to become a teacher, but couldn’t find a position, then began looking for a business to buy. I was almost 50, and my marriage was ending, and all of a sudden I had no money to take over an existing business. I knew I had to start my own’.

Armed with no experience in wine, but a renewed sense of possibilities, Le Dneuff instinctively felt there was a business in helping wineries to become more environmentally aware.

‘Life is surprising. I am a child of the sea, my parents and I used to go collect rubbish from the beach. And when we went fishing we would catch only what we needed, and put the rest back. My parents were poor but taught me to respect things, to respect the sea, and preserve the earth. It serves nothing to consume too much – something that is increasingly being recognised across all industries’.

Le Dneuff’s idea was to find a way for châteaux not to just recycle but to reuse their glass bottles. Her company, called Luz Environnement (so named because she is giving light and life to used bottles), intends to collect, clean and sterilise wine bottles, and then return them to producers (not necessarily the same ones) – with each bottle able to be reused in this way up to seven times.

The process of washing a wine bottle for reuse generates less than 5% of the carbon created in the initial production of that same bottle, and considering there are something like 500 to 600 million bottles of Bordeaux produced each year, that’s a lot of potential savings.

‘I’m not an engineer but I have studied management, I looked at the market, and saw versions of my idea in South Africa, Quebec and Italy. There were individual associations offering the service in France, but no real organised business. And there was clearly a need’.

‘I called everyone I knew, and was eventually put in touch with Sebastien Labat at Benard Magrez’s StartUpVin incubator. I knew I needed somebody with weight in the business to help me get state aid, and Sebastien came to Paris with me to help prove that my solution was viable. I was asking for €500,000 in grants, but came away with €790,000. An amazing result, although I still needed bank loans to be able to finance a factory and buy the machinery’.

Supply chain issues
All of this would have been possible until covid hit, and bank lending dried up. She eventually found a disused warehouse, with 1,200m2 of floor space near to Langon, around 30 minutes to the south of Bordeaux. Owned by a private individual in Verdelais, a pretty village with a 17th century basilica, the warehouse was formerly a factory for production and storage of Perrier.

‘I liked the thought that we were putting bottles back into a site that had once made those iconic green Perrier bottles!’, says le Dneuff, who has christened the site ‘Luz’Ine’ (a play on the French word ‘usine’ for factory).

She finally moved in, and signed for her new glass recycling machines on January 15, 2022… and waited…

A year later, in January 2023, she is finally ready to get started – as the same production and supply chain issues that were making wine producers have difficulty sourcing glass bottles were also holding up the arrival of her machines and various electronic components from Italy, Spain and Germany.

‘The machine for taking the capsules off arrived from Italy in December, the last piece of the puzzle’.

The extra year delay – while paying salaries, rent and loans for the machines, was frustrating of course, but it does mean that Luz’Ine (I am adopting that) is launching into a world where the energy crisis has made bottle production costs shoot up even higher (the price has moved from €0.17 per average bottle to €0.30 over the past 12 months), and wineries generally looking even more closely for ways to cut down on costs, meaning the need for this type of business has come ever more sharply into focus.

There are 400,000 bottles to tackle as of the factory’s first month, with the first deliveries to châteaux planned for March and April – and the next few months will be about analysing how many hours per day or week she should be running the machines. ‘We could do this 24 hours a day’, she says, ‘but I have to balance that against costs of electricity and salaries’. Similarly she has had requests from all over France, but for now she is just working with Bordeaux producers – largely because it makes no sense to launch this as a green initiative and then accept deliveries that will come by road from thousands of kilometres away.

‘Instead I am looking to open smaller local factories in other wine regions, and am already looking at Toulouse, Lyon and Marseille. I believe this is the future way of working’.

The aim for 2023 is to recycle two million bottles, from big name 1855 châteaux to regional cooperatives. ‘I think the real use is for those who don’t have the funds to buy new bottles every year, or who don’t have the sway of large-scale supply chain management for bringing down prices. But this is also a hugely important initiative for any châteaux that wants to show consumers that they care about the environment. By this time next year I should have a better idea of how far this can go’.