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A lobbyist for the glass recycling industry says there’s enough raw material in North America to serve bottlers’ needs. But vendors who procure new bottles for the wine industry say it’s not so simple.
Scott DeFife, president of the Glass Packaging Institute, asserts a “glass shortage” is not an accurate description of the state of the market. He says glass manufacturers have never run out of raw materials to make glass bottles, jars and other containers, and he encourages bottlers to consider switching to domestically sourced glass.
His pitch recently at the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium in Sacramento, Calif., raised some eyebrows among bottle vendors with booths in the trade show, who reported that shipping backlogs of items from China have made the new wine bottles commonly used by wholesalers much more expensive and difficult to get.
“The glass shortage is extreme,” Cynthia Fisher of West Coast Bottles in El Dorado Hills, Calif, told Farm Progress.
DeFife says improving the bottle recycling system in the U.S. and building more...