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Getting some good press is a company I hope does well, Wine Bottle Recycling (A+ for name matching function). They are trying to adopt the European (and worldwide) model for wine bottle reuse in the US.

From Mother Nature Network:

Wine Bottle Recycling is the idea of Bruce Stephens, a home wine maker, who had one of those middle of the night epiphanies. He did some research and found out some interesting and disheartening statistics about used wine bottles.

• Seven out of 10 wine bottles in the United States end up in landfill.

• The U.S. is one of the few nations that does not collect and reuse their bottles on a large scale.

• In Europe, most wine bottles are used an average eight times before they are discarded.

• 60 percent of a wine bottle’s carbon footprint comes from the creation of the bottle.

• The energy it requires to melt the glass in the recycling process, along with the amount of broken glass that doesn’t get recycled, makes the recycling of glass bottles a lot less environmentally friendly than many people think it is.

From Recordnet.com:

While there are 40 to 50 such bottle-washing operations in Europe, the Stockton facility will be the only one in the United States, said Bruce Stephens, Wine Bottle Recycling's chief executive and "chief bottle washer."

It's a great location, Stephens told a Greater Stockton Chamber of Commerce Green Team San Joaquin meeting Wednesday.

California wineries produce about 300 million cases of wine a year or, at the standard 750-milliliter bottle size, 3.6 billion bottles. And 70 percent of that production is in the San Joaquin Valley from Lodi to Madera.

"This is where all the bottles are," he told the gathering of more than 50 people.

Initially, his company will receive unwanted bottles from the large-scale wineries - glass being discarded as excess or, perhaps, because of package changes or mislabeling.

Eventually, Stephens hopes to establish a post-consumer collection system for wine bottles, offering to pay for discards at "bottle shacks" or from waste-hauling companies.

Bohemian (a great independent newspaper from my neck of the woods) has the full scoop.