With a shared commitment to sustainability, Orora and Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) have joined forces to develop a closed loop system for recycling glass from TWE’s packaging centre at TWE Barossa.
TWE Barossa is TWE’s largest bottling operation in Australia. More than 250 employees work at the site across six bottling lines, where they package more than 200 million bottles of wine per year.
When you’re bottling in such high volumes, there’s bound to be a few breakages and some left-over stock. So, with a core focus on sustainability, TWE and Orora have come together to design a closed loop recycling system to manage all waste glass from the site.
How does our closed loop process work?
The cycle begins at Orora’s state-of-the-art glass production facility in Gawler, South Australia, where Orora produces over 30 different wine bottle types in six colour options, including unique and fully customised bottles just for TWE.
Bottles are delivered directly to TWE Barossa for bottling a range of wines from the TWE portfolio of brands.
Throughout the bottling process, any breakages or waste glass is collected and stored in dedicated glass waste bins. Each week, the waste glass is collected and transported for beneficiation, if required.
Beneficiation is the process of removing any contaminants from the glass, such as removing any metals which might be left on the bottle from wine closures. The glass is then crushed to a specific size, which turns it into cullet, before being returned to Orora Glass.
100% of the cullet received goes back into the furnace at Orora Glass, where it is melted down so that it can be made into new wine bottles. This creates a complete closed loop system for recycling TWE wine bottles. The best part is – glass is infinitely recyclable – so this process can continue… forever!
Since the program commenced in 2019, over 350 tonnes of waste glass has been collected from TWE Barossa for recycling in Orora’s closed-loop system.
Well done to all involved.
