New Ways with Old Wine Bottles

I’m always on the lookout for interesting, useful, attractive, and durable eco-friendly products. I like knowing that my purchases support companies doing great things for the environment.  I especially like products that help people reduce, re-use and recycle.  Small individual and family-run operations interest me the most.

I find cool products and they find me
I’m doing what I do––visiting friends, reading a book, magazine or newsletter, shopping at a farmers’ market, checking out an email link someone sent me, teaching a cooking class, or speaking to a group about healthy cooking and I happen upon something that intrigues me.

I recently had a book signing table at the downtown Phoenix Public Market. The Market Coordinator set me up across from a young man with beautiful dark colored dinking glasses. He used some of them as vases filled with fresh flowers. I liked the simplicity, crisp lines, colors, and shape of his drinking glasses. What I liked even more was learning that the glasses were made from empty wine bottles that he cut the tops off of and impeccably smoothed around the edges.

A new way to recycle wine bottles
Conventional recycling—shipping then melting down spent plastic, metal, or glass, and transforming it into something else—eats up enormous amounts of energy. It would be far more energy efficient to intercept the meltdown process and reuse something without investing a lot of energy.

No more wasted wine bottles
Imagine how many wine bottles are tossed into the trash every day, week, and month in restaurants, wine bars, and private homes? What if half of the wine bottles used in the city of Phoenix or the state of Arizona could be collected, transported to Ray Delmuro through his company, Refresh Glass, and turned into drinking glasses, flower vases, tooth brush holders, pencil holders, or customized gifts for graduations, birthdays, anniversaries, or wedding parties, or promotional products. What if we had someone like Ray doing this in every state in the nation? Think of how much energy we, as a nation, could save.

 The Refresh Glass story
Refresh Glass started with the idea of combining manufacturing, engineering and art to craft a fun product that makes a difference in the world.

In early 2008, having been back in the States after a year of travel, Ray received a small bottle cutting kit in the mail that he had forgotten he had ordered. The kit contained a small sparring jig for scoring the bottles, a candle to heat the score lines to make the bottle crack in all the right places (along the lines) to separate the bottle, and sandpaper to smooth the sharp edges.

The first glass took Ray hours to complete to his liking. He knew there had to be a more efficient way to make them and eventually he found it.  Today he uses torches and industrial ovens to modify preexisting wine bottles, to stress relieve them, making them as durable as possible, so consumers will have sturdy, attractive drinking glasses, vases, candle holders, pencil holders, and customized gifts.

 It felt like a challenge at first, but now the hobby has turned into a growing business. Every day the product seems to achieve added flavor.  People call and tell Ray about why one of his glasses is their favorite, how the ability to print on the glasses works for their business, or how excited they were to give a set as a gift.

Ray wants to give back to the environment so his company donates $0.50 from every Refresh Glass set purchased to an environmental education charity.

Where can you get Ray’s Refreshed Glasses?
You can visit him at the Phoenix Public Market on Saturday mornings (721 N. Central
 Ave., SE Corner of Central Ave. & McKinley St., 2 blocks south of Roosevelt) between 8 am and 1 pm, or shop for Ray's Refreshed Glasses at Whole Foods Markets throughout Arizona. Eventually his company may have regional and national distribution through the natural foods chain. If you have wine bottles you would like to give him, you can drop them off at Whole Foods Markets. Tell the cashier you’re donating them to Refresh Glass. You can even write that on the bag you leave there.

To learn more about Refresh Glass and Ray’s functional bottle art, you can visit his web sit

Comments

[Glasses]

This is a realy beautiful site, i love its design and content.

[Davino]

I love it. Collectors hold onto so many bottles, and this is a great way to remember and hold onto the wine that was. It looks ideal for a tall glass of lemonade on a hot summer day...