Sustainably Yours: Decorate Your Home With Wine (Bottles)

If you enjoying sipping wine from time to time, you probably also inevitably recycle your fair share of glass bottles. Good! Glass is one of the easiest materials to recycle because it never really wears out, and most bottles are made of at least 25 percent recycled glass to begin with. So, what’s the deal? If recycling glass is easy and efficient, why do anything but that? Frankly, you may not want to do anything aside from recycling. But the nature of Sustainably Yours is that you do what’s right, easy and effective for you… and if you, like me, enjoy sipping wine while reading a book in the comfort of your cozy, eco-decorated home, then you just might want to consider the other, more creative, “green” options your empty wine bottles are offering you.

I turned this personally significant bottle of dessert wine, once finished, into a simple, elegant vase that now rests on my windowsill. It was literally as simple as steaming the label off of the bottle itself (setting the bottle over a small pot of boiling water until the label peeled off), and scraping the gluey residue off with a scour pad. It required about ten minutes of my time, and I did it without using any unnatural resources (chemicals) and with minimal electricity (just the heating up of the water with my stove).

If you want to take the wine bottle decor up a notch, consider using tape and tempura paint to design a painted wine bottle vase. For a how-to, consider checking out the DIY book Eco-Craft. These painted bottles are pretty, but aren’t quite as easily crafted as the simple, plain wine bottle decor I made. Either way, reusing bottles for decor is a great way to decorate your home “greenly” without spending a penny more than the cost of the wine you already enjoyed.

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