Recycled Glassware from Mexico

Our recycled glassware is made in a family-run workshop, which uses Pepsi bottles and other discarded glass items at the end of their reusable lives. The glass is melted down and then mouth-blown: each piece is shaped by hand and eye, using techniques that date back thousands of years. The trace of the maker is left behind as the glass solidifies – small ripples, tiny bubbles and optical distortions are an integral part of the glassware’s texture and appearance. It is not for those who favour the symmetry of the production line.

We stock four ranges of recycled hand-blown glassware: engraved, rimmed, coloured, and two-tone glassware.

The clear glass is dishwasher-friendly unless otherwise stated. Its chunkiness means that it resists physical shock better than most glassware, but as with all handmade glassware, it is vulnerable to temperature shock.

Glass recycles perfectly because it is made of such simple materials. It is a myth that recycling glass uses more energy than it saves: recycling two glass bottles saves the equivalent energy of boiling five cups of water – a small saving, until you take into account that 240,000,000 tons of glass end up in landfill per year!

In the UK we use 331 glass bottles per person, per year. Glass recycling also reduces the need for the energy-intensive mining of lime and silica. For every ton of recycled glass, 1.2 tonnes of raw materials are preserved. Even in accounting for transport and processing, recycling saves 315kg of CO2 per ton of glass.