Spin the Bottle: How a local brewery found a way to recycle its glass.

• Author: Taylor, Adva
• Position: Lessons Learned

Before going green became popular, Salt Lake Brewing Company co-founders Jeff Polychronis and Peter Cole were committed to environmental responsibility. They formed their brewing company to embrace the "triple bottom line" ideal--putting not just profit, but people and planet first.

But a decade or so ago, there wasn't much of an infrastructure for businesses that wanted to embrace sustainability. Salt Lake Brewing Company's founders and employees were passionate about the idea of having a robust glass recycling program, but didn't have a way to make that happen--the city did not yet have a program, and neither did any other company they could find. So they became invested in finding their own solution.

"We were generating tons of glass--everything we made was in glass bottles, not cans. And the city didn't have a program," says James Soares, director of operations for Salt Lake Brewing Company. "But we didn't give up on finding a way to recycle our glass."

Keeping everyone on board

If your company is looking for out-of-the-box solutions to novel problems, the first thing to know is that everyone--from the c-suite to the intern--needs to be on board with your mission, says Soares. Why? Because many of those out-of-the-box solutions don't work the way you want them to, and you don't want people to bail at the first sign of turbulence.

For instance, the first thing Salt Lake Brewing Company tried was a "closing the loop" approach, says Soares. He'd heard of glass blowers at Sundance that utilized old beer bottles, blowing glass by hand to create cups. A light bulb went on in Soares' head--they could have their beer bottles blown into glasses and utilize them in the restaurant! A perfect closed-loop approach!

"[Glass is] infinitely recyclable! It's one of those things that, if we manage the glass we already have out there in the world, we'd probably never have to mine any virgin product to make more glass," says Soares.

But the cups they had made started having problems almost immediately. The glass wasn't tempered, so when heated or cooled too quickly, the cups would break. They were heavy, which made the wait staff complain. They were handmade, so each was a different height and shape and thus bartenders couldn't serve beer in them. The customers liked it--but they were the only ones.

"So we bagged it, but we didn't give up on the idea of glass recycling," says Soares--and a big reason was because, even though the wait staff hadn't liked the...