The joy of bottles remade from curbside recycling.

There is a lovely feeling about enjoying mead that comes from the flowers growing around us, then putting it into bottles made from the glass we recycle.

At Undisturbed, we're increasingly looking at how the things we use can come from closer to home. Not just the honey that goes into our mead, but the packaging that carries it.

We’ve a new project to put the peoples favourite, Rhubarb Mead, into 750ml wine bottles (full blog on that to come). And we’ve found glass bottles are made in New Zealand, using recycled glass collected through local recycling systems. Glass that once held wine or other everyday products that you all took the time to recycle is re-made into our new mead bottles. How cool is that!

Glass with a local history

Every week, households across New Zealand put glass bottles and jars out for recycling. Once collected and sorted, suitable glass can be crushed into cullet and melted down to manufacture new glass products.

Unlike many packaging materials, glass can be recycled repeatedly without losing its fundamental material properties. Using recycled glass also reduces the need for virgin raw materials and generally requires less energy than producing glass entirely from new materials.

By choosing bottles manufactured here in New Zealand from recycled glass, we're supporting a local recycling and manufacturing system, while reducing our reliance on imported packaging. We are funding kiwi jobs and we’re cutting back even further on the use of fossil fuels.

It's a practical decision, and there's a connection to it that goes beyond the environmental benefits.

From the flowers around us

Honey is a product of its surroundings. Bees collect nectar from flowers growing across our landscapes, from native mānuka and kānuka to clover, orchards and gardens. The plants available to the bees influence the character of the honey, and that honey becomes the foundation of our mead.

The same landscape we see every day contributes to what ends up in our glass.

Our packaging now has a connection to everyday New Zealand life too. The bottles we finish using, rinse and place in our recycling bins become part of the material available to make new bottles.

Both the drink and its packaging have origins in the places we live.

Keeping more of the journey in New Zealand

Packaging has an environmental cost, regardless of where it comes from. Glass is relatively heavy, and manufacturing it requires considerable heat and energy. Recycling doesn't eliminate those impacts, but it can reduce the demand for new raw materials and the energy required to manufacture glass.

Local production also means supporting New Zealand manufacturing and making use of materials already circulating through our economy.

For a small Christchurch meadery, these are choices we can make as we grow. We can choose New Zealand honey, work with local suppliers, and select packaging that makes use of the glass New Zealanders have already recycled.

A bottle that comes full circle

When you finish a bottle of Undisturbed, we'd like you to recycle it.

That simple act keeps valuable material available for another use. The glass might become another wine bottle, a jar, or perhaps another bottle of mead.

We make our mead from honey gathered from the flowers of Aotearoa. We package it in glass recovered from the things New Zealanders have already used.

And when the last glass is poured, the bottle can begin the journey again.