Can you believe it? The holiday season has rolled around AGAIN! In no time, you’ll be up to your eyeballs in turkey and stuffing, Christmas tree decorating, and holiday office parties and festivities. Instead of tossing your empty beverage bottles, why not save the environment, rescue the economy, and give someone a chance?

        Sustainable Futures can help you do just that. This Boise organization helps reduce the amount of glass that goes into landfills by recycling and repurposing wine, beer, and liquor bottles into other glassware—from drinking glasses and windchimes to vases and candle holders. In selling these unique products to restaurants and retail outlets, it creates a new revenue stream to help boost the local economy. And the program provides jobs for members of the community who face significant employment barriers, specifically people recently released from prison, refugees, and at-risk youth.

        While the conservation and economic aspects of Sustainable Future’s mission are important, the employment component is perhaps the most critical. Sustainable Future’s program doesn’t just provide a job for difficult-to-place people—it also gives them life-skills training, work experience in the manufacturing industry, and one-on-one coaching and mentoring for seeking a permanent job upon completion of the program. The primary focus of the program is to equip participants with every tool they need to emerge from their experiences and become functioning members of the community.

        Sustainable Futures’ tangible wish list is short: empty wine, beer, and liquor bottles. (They cannot use other glass products such as olive oil bottles, spaghetti sauce jars, or broken window panes, so please take those items to a glass recycling bin.)

        The organization’s more intangible wish list, however, is long, but the resources are plentiful in our community. They need experience and expertise. Volunteers who are well-versed in just about any area of running a business are desperately needed to help Sustainable Futures become more efficient and adept. If you know how to manage an office, market products, make a production facility more efficient, keep an organization’s books, run a sales campaign, manage inventory, or have any other expertise that you think would be beneficial in Sustainable Futures’ operations, they want to talk to you! You can volunteer short-term (take a few hours to teach the staff how to do what you do) or long-term (do the job yourself!).

        To learn more about Sustainable Futures and how you can help, visit http://sustain able-futures.us, call 322-8272, or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . They are located at 5858 W. Franklin Rd. in Boise (drop off your empties there). In Boise, their products are sold at Indie Made, Dunia Marketplace (Hyde Park), The Record Exchange, Boise Co-Op, and The Basque Market.

Donna Bankhead is a contributing writer from Boise.