Dilemma
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Is wine greener from a box or a bottle?
The energy-guzzling wine bottle has had its day. Lucy Siegle raises a glass to the new lightweight recyclable cartons
Sunday October 7, 2007
The Observer
Wine gives the impression it's deeply in sync with its agricultural roots, with many bottles featuring bucolic pictures of vines and healthy grape-pickers. Keeping that impression of agrarian harmony intact is difficult, however, given that viticulture has a massive energy and waste footprint. This is soberingly described in a 2005 study by environmental physicist Maurizio Cellura, in which he announces that a single bottle of red wine (in this case the Terre della Baronia from a small winery in Italy), created more than a pound of waste and released 16g of sulphur dioxide. The premium-glass bottle contributed 50 per cent of the impact.
Dilemma
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Is wine greener from a box or a bottle?
The energy-guzzling wine bottle has had its day. Lucy Siegle raises a glass to the new lightweight recyclable cartons
Sunday October 7, 2007
The Observer
Wine gives the impression it's deeply in sync with its agricultural roots, with many bottles featuring bucolic pictures of vines and healthy grape-pickers. Keeping that impression of agrarian harmony intact is difficult, however, given that viticulture has a massive energy and waste footprint. This is soberingly described in a 2005 study by environmental physicist Maurizio Cellura, in which he announces that a single bottle of red wine (in this case the Terre della Baronia from a small winery in Italy), created more than a pound of waste and released 16g of sulphur dioxide. The premium-glass bottle contributed 50 per cent of the impact.
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This is motivating change in the UK. We are the world's biggest importer of wine, a vino-guzzling island par excellence, knocking back nearly 1bn litres every year, 98-99 per cent of which is imported, and 50 per cent of that from the New World, predominantly in heavy glass bottles which we can't reuse - we don't (yet) have the climate for an indigenous wine industry. Consequently, if you're looking for a carbon-intensive hobby, being a wine buff comes second to lighting patio heaters for fun.
In response, the industry is looking at packaging, and not since early civilisations began ferrying wine about in goats' bladders has there been such a slew of innovations. These began with 'lightweighting' glass bottles, which many retailers now do. But there is still much variation: the lightest 75cl bottle weighs around 300g empty, while the average is 500g. Plus, unless you can turn yourself into a human scale in the supermarket, how can you tell?
Which is why more overtly 'eco' innovations are attractive: choose from Arniston Bay (South African) in an E-Pak foil and plastic pouch (from Tesco and Waitrose), French Rabbit in a Tetra Pak and Andrew Pearce (Australian) in a FuturPak carton (made almost entirely from renewable materials) from the Co-op. Then this month Sainsbury's launches two own-brand wines in - horror of horrors - a PET plastic bottle.
I know what you're thinking: foil, plastic, PET, inner layers and outer layers of metallised labels and fused plastics don't sound like planet-savers. They wouldn't be if it wasn't for the inherent problems with recycling the 600,000 tonnes of waste green glass that come into the UK every year. If every producer or retailer changed to the lightest available packs, the wine industry could save 990,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year.
A plastic receptacle does not guarantee an 'eco' wine. In Cellura's study, 20 per cent of the impact was attributed to pesticides, so buying organic or biodynamic wine shrinks your footprint, too. But moving away from the hegemony of the glass bottle is a good start. Think of it as picking the low-hanging fruits. | 
