Every Understory order ships with a prepaid return label. Most people use it years later, when a cap finally cracks or a bottle picks up one dent too many. This is what happens after the box leaves your door.

First stop: the repair bench

Around a third of what comes back never needs to be melted at all. Our bench team swaps seals, replaces caps and buffs out scratches. Repaired units are tested, cleaned and sent back out as refurbished stock, with the same ten-year promise as new.

Second stop: sorting by alloy

What cannot be repaired is taken apart by hand. Aluminium shells go in one bin, steel springs in another, silicone seals in a third. Keeping the streams clean is the difference between recycling and downcycling, so nothing is shredded together.

Last stop: the smelter

Our smelting partner runs on hydropower and melts the sorted aluminium into billets. Those billets are spun into new shells, and the loop starts again. Last year 96% of returned material made it back into stock. We are working on the last four percent.