S'GLÀS

Led by glass designer Maya Thomas (Artenréel) with the engineering consultancy Innosophia, S’Glàs grew out of an unprecedented partnership between a craftswoman and environmentally minded Alsatian restaurateurs and winegrowers: every week, Maya collects between 200 and 1,000 empty wine bottles from her partners and turns them into water glasses in her workshop. In Alsace, where deposit schemes for beer and lemonade bottles have survived since the 1960s, wine bottles still fall outside this virtuous approach, even though they account for 125 million units a year. Turning a bottle into a glass takes seven steps that are tedious and physically demanding by hand; in partnership with Innosophia, Maya has set up a workshop equipped with machines specially designed to make the process easier.