Not quite wine drinking

[jsolomon]

Pardon my thought process. It's a little muddled right now.

Anyway. I'm curious, what do people do with their emptied wine bottles? I had a brainstorm while talking with a friend about using them inverted to border a raised herb bed.

Experiences? Thoughts? Other ideas?

[carswell]

Have never understood why wine and liquor bottles don't have a return deposit like beer and soft drink bottles/cans do. Mine usually go into a recycling bin. But a lot of people here just throw them into the trash. Of course, they do that with return deposit bottles too...

Re your raised bed idea: breakage would be a concern. You know, from shovels, hoes and inadvertent kicks. And what would happen if someone fell on them? (I stopped biking with bottles and other glass containers in my backsack when I realized that the three or four times I've been thrown from my bike, I've ended up on my back.) Also, before investing much effort in constructing such a bed, I'd do some small scale experiments. How well would half-buried bottles stand up to the freeze-thaw cycle and UV radiation?

Edited May 2, 2005 by carswell (log)

[bigbear]

From a three year old BBC article on the passing of Freddy Heineken.

Click here.

He developed a square beer bottle that he believed could be used as a brick to help solve environmental pollution and housing shortages in developing countries.

Heineken management disagreed, rejecting the "World Beer" bottle.

[jsolomon]

I'm not really all that concerned about breakage, etc. Bottles are generally made with thick, resilient glass, and I have a fenced-in yard and am sans-children. Also, I am very familiar with how to work a rake and a shovel, so if I break one, I can fish out the pieces.

Also, if someone trips into it, they'll also crack their head on the side of the tool shed. Life is not meant to be safe.

[mklynch]

We bought our house 3 years ago from the guy who built it and lived in it since 1978. It has 2 second story decks. He liked wine and loved to party and apparently loved throwing wine bottles into the woods off the deck. I've pulled out at least 20 bottles over these years, none broken and some with readable labels still. Wish I'd been at a couple of those parties!

We are boring, however, and put our bottles and the ones I pull out of the woods in the recycle bin for the teatotling neighbors to gossip about.

[SWISS_CHEF]

In Switzerland we recycle EVERYTHING. Even 98% of batteries sold here are recycled. No one recycles better than the Swiss.

The truth is we pay almost 3 bucks tax to throw out a little 35 liter bag of trash and everything we recycle is free.