What Actually Happens to a Jar When We Reuse It?

A reader recently asked me if I could explain how we actually clean the glass jars that we reuse.

It’s a good question. We talk a lot about recycling and reuse, but there is a lot that has to happen between someone dropping a used jar into one of our collection boxes and that jar being ready to go back out into the market.

We’ve been doing this for a while now. We started selling reused glass concentrate jars in July of 2022. That first year we sold 5,440 of them.

Since then, we’ve sold 66,871 reused glass jars.

After processing that many jars, we’ve learned quite a bit about what makes a package reusable. One of the biggest lessons might be surprising.

The cannabis oil isn’t really the problem. The label is.

It Starts With the Jar

When glass jars come back through our recycling program, the first question is whether the jar is still usable.

If it’s chipped or damaged, it’s out. If the lid is cheap and won’t come off, it’s gone.

But assuming the glass itself is in good condition and able to separate, what really determines whether we can reuse it is often the label.

Some labels come off relatively easily. Others don’t.

In our experience, paper labels tend to be the easiest to remove. Vinyl labels are much more likely to rip and tear during the process or leave material behind. The adhesive itself also makes a huge difference, although I’ll leave the chemistry behind that to people who know labels better than I do.

My team estimates that somewhere around 30 to 40% of the jars that come through our facility ultimately can’t be reused. That’s a rough estimate because what we receive varies tremendously from batch to batch.

But it demonstrates something important.

You can make a perfectly reusable glass jar unusable simply by putting the wrong label on it.

I think there is an opportunity here for the future. If we’re serious about building reuse systems, we should eventually be looking not only at whether the package itself can be reused, but whether everything we put on that package allows it to be reused.

Into the Alcohol

Jars that make it through our initial inspection are placed into buckets of 99% isopropyl alcohol.

They soak for at least 24 hours, and sometimes longer.

The alcohol does most of the work on the remaining cannabis oil. By the time we pull the jars out, the oil generally isn’t the issue anymore.

Then comes the hard part.

We manually remove the labels.

This is where the difference between labels becomes obvious. Some peel away relatively cleanly. Others rip into pieces or leave adhesive behind that has to be removed.

Once the labels are gone and the jars have passed that stage of inspection, they’re ready for washing.

Cleaning and Sanitizing

The jars are loaded into our commercial dishwasher.

Our machine is set up to reach 140 degrees and uses a food-safe chemical sanitizer. The goal isn’t simply to make the jar look clean. We’re putting these containers back into circulation, so we have to be confident in what we’re sending back out.

As soon as the jars come out of the dishwasher, we use compressed air to dry them.

This is probably the most labor-intensive part of the entire process.

Every jar gets handled and inspected. We’re looking for anything that shouldn’t be there: residual adhesive, scratches, damage or anything else that makes us uncomfortable putting that jar back into circulation.

Even after everything a jar has already been through, we typically reject another 20 to 25 jars for every 320 that reach this stage.

That’s another roughly 6 to 8% that don’t make it through final quality control.

The jars that pass are boxed, 320 jars per case, and they’re ready to be sold and used again.

But What Happens to All That Alcohol?

This is the other side of the process that people don’t usually see.

Using isopropyl alcohol to clean jars doesn’t make much environmental sense if we’re constantly throwing away hundreds of gallons of alcohol in order to reuse glass.

So we don’t.

We use the same alcohol repeatedly.

As it gets dirty, we filter it to remove larger debris and continue using it. Eventually, however, it becomes contaminated enough that it isn’t effective for cleaning anymore.

That’s when we distill it.

We have our own distillation unit that allows us to process the spent isopropyl alcohol and recover the alcohol so we can use it again.

The contaminants that don’t distill out with the alcohol become a concentrated waste stream, which we take to Metro for proper disposal.

The difference in volume is pretty remarkable.

We’ve run more than 500 gallons of used isopropyl alcohol through our distillation unit and generated only about 15 gallons of residual waste.

That doesn’t mean we’ve eliminated 97% of our waste or that we’ve purchased 500 gallons of alcohol. Much of that alcohol has gone through the system more than once.

That’s the point.

We’re not just trying to reuse the jar. We’re trying to reuse as much of what it takes to clean that jar as possible.

What Reuse Actually Looks Like

I think sometimes we make reuse sound easier than it really is.

Collect the container. Wash it. Use it again.

In reality, there is a lot more to it.

Someone has to collect it. Someone has to inspect it. Labels and lids have to come off. The container has to be cleaned and sanitized. It has to pass quality control. The materials used during that cleaning process have to be managed too.

And after all of that, some containers still won’t make it.

But we’ve now put 66,871 glass jars back into circulation that otherwise would have needed to be replaced with newly manufactured jars.

That’s what makes reuse interesting to me.

We’re learning what works because we’re actually doing it.

We’ve learned that cannabis residue isn’t the obstacle we might have expected. We’ve learned that something as seemingly insignificant as a label can determine whether a glass jar gets another life. We’ve learned how to recover and repeatedly use the alcohol necessary to make the system work.

And we’re still learning.

If Oregon wants to build more reuse into its packaging system, I think these are exactly the kinds of lessons we need to pay attention to.

Reusability isn’t just about what a package is made from.

It’s about designing the entire system around giving that package another life.