When my wife's sister and her husband were running a 5-star hotel (a swimming pool in every room), they came to visit us for a few weeks. Being used to a bottle or two of wine themselves with every dinner, and having dinners nearly every night for friends and family who caught up with them at our place, we ended up with more than a garbage can full of empty wine bottles.
This bothered my wife. She is frugal. She decided all of those empties could be turned into glassware.
That began a process that spanned several summers. My wife would come up with a new method to cut the top off the bottle to make a glass. Then she would try a new method to polish the rim of the glass. She'd show it to me, and I would say (more politely than related here), "Gee, honey. That really looks like crap."
Criticism was my major contribution to the process. Over time though, I found less and less to criticize. Not long after that, all of our friends had more glassware than they could use. So my wife started selling her glasses. Whenever anyone came to our house, they brought empty bottles - grocery bags or boxes full of empty bottles. We thought of setting aside money for a liver transplant fund for some of our friends. When my wife goes to the recycling center, she returns with more than she took there. Our cat eats and drinks from custom made glassware (the bottoms of gallon jugs make good water bowls).
Eventually, my wife's glasses were good enough to sell. And when I say good enough - her first customer was a restaurant in town. Bartenders or restaurateurs here can tell you how fussy establishments are about their glassware - no nicks, chips or other hazards, and has to look good too.
The picture at right is a little pixelated, being reduced in size to about 15% of the original, but I think you can still see the quality of the glass's rim. My wife developed a process to produce perfect rims just doing "cold-working" - there's no heating involved in the production process.
A short interjection is needed here: I'm not going to describe the glassware making process - it's a trade secret to begin with, it requires some investment and skills, and it isn't that profitable a business. Also, my wife sells mostly wholesale, and mostly locally, so this diary isn't an advertisement or solicitation - she has more business than she can handle at the moment.
My other contribution to glassware making is that I drink a lot of Coke, and Costco sells Mexican Coke (sugar, not corn syrup) in glass bottles. I suggested they'd make nice juice glasses. They've become my wife's biggest seller. Mexican Coke is more expensive, but we now make a profit on every bottle I drink. I don't get to Costco often enough to keep a big supply, but a local pizzeria also sells Mexican Coke and saves the bottles for my wife.
The Coke glasses, along with other glasses made from wine bottles, booze bottles, even beer bottles (although many are too thin to be usable as glasses) sell through a local natural foods store - not only glasses, but bowls, vases, lanterns, candle holders and other items. I don't want to get into pricing, but you can find glassware from recycled bottles in catalogs and online - my wife's retail for considerably less. That's because she sells them to the store for a low price. The objective of this activity is to make some money, but also to do something enjoyable, and to recycle as much glass as possible. At a low price, you recycle more glass.
Where we live, recycling glass is a major issue. We have a number of local wineries, each with a tasting room or restaurant that produces thousand of empties every year. We have a great local recycling center, but to recycle glass, especially green glass, they have to pay someone to take it, unlike paper and aluminum which are more or less profitable to recycle.
So the next step was to begin working with the wineries. A number of local wineries, instead of having paper or plastic labels glued to their bottles, have their logo and other information screened on the bottles with a durable ink or paint. The artwork is both distinctive and very nice, and my wife makes glasses for them from their bottles that they sell in their gift shops. She collects a few dozen cases of empties at a time, turns them into glasses, and sells them back to the wineries.
My wife has also gotten involved with the city and recycling center to come up with more useful ways to recycle all of the waste glass produced locally - my wife recycles a few thousand bottles every year, but that's a tiny fraction of the local waste. So far, nothing has been accomplished yet in that area.
When the economy crashed, so, surprisingly, did the 5-star hotel business, so my wife's sister and husband moved back to the US. He had a good job involving a lot of travel, so she moved in with us temporarily. She also wanted to do glasswork - kiln work - and my wife's work is all wet work and has to be done outside, but we get winters here. They decided to go in on a shed - excuse me, studio. They bought a pre-fabbed 10x20 building from the lumber yard with windows already framed. Our neighbor had windows and a patio door he salvaged from a remodeling job, we got insulation from Craigslist, defective plywood cheap from another neighbor, ran a 100 amp service to the shed - excuse me, studio - and they were in business with a year-round facility. It has heat, but a 12KW kiln makes that largely unnecessary.
My sister-in-law did more "art" compared to my wife's more functional "crafts" pieces. Eventually, her husband settled down in the midwest, and she moved there to be with him, and my wife was left with an almost new kiln (that she paid for).
Kiln-work with glass isn't like glass-blowing, where you melt the glass to a liquid state to work with it (one of my wife's brothers has an MFA in glass-blowing, but he says what she does is impossible - not very helpful). What my wife's sister did, and my wife is starting to do now, involves heating the glass until it's more taffy-like, and then fusing pieces of glass together or letting them sag over a form (slumping).
Fusing involves taking chunks of glass - anything from small pieces to large, flat panes, and heating them so the fuse together. It's somewhat like making S'mores (graham crackers, chocolate and marshmallows melted together) or when pancake batter runs together on a griddle - really thick pancake batter. Slumping is just what is sounds like - the glass is heated just hot enough to sag into or over a form, to make a bowl, plate, sushi dish or something else. The bowls and plate were made from Bombay Gin bottles smashed into fragments, fused into discs and then slumped.
There are a couple of things I hope people take away from this. This isn't recycling on a grand "save the planet" scale, but for the people that buy my wife's glassware, all of the processes use less energy than the equivalent new product would require for manufacturing and shipping. You can think globally and act locally.
Also, in these times a lot of people need additional sources of income. We didn't make a huge investment in this, but with the shed - excuse me, studio - and kiln plus all of the other equipment, supplies, fixtures, etc. it's probably run to $10,000 over 3 or 4 years and is just now turning a net profit. We're near retirement, and this might produce a nice supplemental income, but probably not a living wage.
However, you can develop a business which will turn into your livelihood - we operate another business which has been our sole support for nearly 25 years. To develop that took some of the same things noted here - it took work and study to acquire the knowledge and skills to operate the business; we've focused on turning out a useful product with the best quality we can achieve; we've continued developing our business in different ways; and we've developed relationships and partnerships with our customers so that we can spend more time producing and less time acquiring new customers.
If you think you have a good idea - and they can come from anywhere, even drunken relatives - start small and build it into something. You may be surprised at how successful you can be, and how much fun you can have doing it.
Update
If you order online, be sure to know whether the price is per glass or per set of glasses - I'm not completely clear on that in looking at some of the sources I found on google. Also factor in shipping, which will probably be more than $10 from anywhere.
There are a couple of companies/co-ops that recycle bottles to make glassware, jewelry and other things. One is The Green Glass Co. in WI. They appear to do a lot more than cut and polish, although they do that, too. They seem reasonably priced.
Another is Bottlehood in CA and CO.
They both sell online either directly or through Etsy.
Or just google "glasses from recycled bottles" - a lot more stuff turns up.