Wine Bottle Recycling

Now I know the title of this blog post might be a little misleading, but I’m not talking about putting your empty wine bottles in your recycling bin (which you should do if you’re getting rid of them though).  I’m talking about ways you can use your wine bottles after you’ve already emptied them of all the good stuff.

First, there are wine cork trivets.  My wife and I have a lot of corks lying around our house, and given as we do a lot of cooking at home, we figured a great way to use those wine corks was to turn them into trivets for placing hot pots, pans, and baking sheets.

To make, simply use a glue gun to connect the corks to each other, making a square, rectangle, or whatever shape you happen to prefer.  You can use a mold like the image above, or just glue them together without one.

For the wine bottles themselves, there are a few things you can do.  What my wife and I do is take the wine bottles that we like and place them above our kitchen cabinets to fill in the space between them and the ceiling.  This is a great way to fill in empty space and to keep a reminder of the wines that you’ve had for future reference.

As you can see from our kitchen cabinets, we really like wine.  You can stagger, stack, or line up the bottles however best fits your taste and your kitchen.  When you’ve filled up the entire area, you can either find new places to keep the bottles, or start switching out older bottles for newer ones that you like better.

Finally, you can turn your wine bottles into lamps.  Using either lights or oil, your wine bottles can light up your house or your backyard after the sun’s gone down and you’re still outside with friends enjoying a bottle of vino.

For a lighted lamp, you’ll need to drill into the base of the bottle using a special diamond drill bit.  After you’ve created a hole large enough, feed in the lights (Christmas lights work the best) and decorate the bottle however you prefer.

For an oil lamp, you can purchase wicks designed to fit into a wine bottle.  Simply fill the bottle with lamp oil (available at your local hardware store), add the wick, and light.  Personally, I prefer citronella oil in my wine bottle lamps as it’s great for lighting my deck or patio and keeping the bugs away.

If you’ve got other ways to reuse your wine bottles and corks, I’d love to hear about it.  Send ideas and pictures to me and I may just feature them on my site.