Darnley's recycled gin candles

We are at the start of a sustainability journey here at Darnley’s Gin, making small but important steps as we focus on it as our key objective. Those of you who are avid Darnley’s followers will have spotted the introduction of our recyclable gin pouches in January as refills to save on both transport and production emissions. Now we are looking at what we can do to further reduce single use glass.

We have therefore partnered with sustainability company The Tipsy House, based in Aberdeen, to recycle our 70cl glass bottles into candles. The Tipsy house do this across different categories, including rum, vodka and champagne as well as gin. Not only does this avoid single use glass, but the candles themselves contain eco-soy wax making them not only environmentally friendly but vegan friendly too. In addition, all the candles are poured by hand meaning this is genuinely ‘hand-crafted’.

We are now looking at whether we can include them in a gift pack, which would make make ideal present for Mother’s Day. We’d love to know what you think; please let us know via our social media channels @darnleysgin.

To help drive the recycling of our bottles, and help us produce more candles, we are incentivising those with empty bottles to bring them back to the our distillery in Fife in exchange for a money-off voucher, or bring four empty bottles back to exchange for a free gin tour. We are keen, however, to stress that we promote responsible drinking.

We’d love to be able to turn our bottles into other usable items to help drive down single use even further, such as lamps. Please do let us know if you have any ideas of what you’d like to see, and indeed craftsmen who can help us turn this ambition into a reality.