Wine in Flat-Shaped Plastic Bottles: More Sustainable? - Core77
Wine in Flat-Shaped Plastic Bottles: More Sustainable? - Core77
The UK's Wine Society, a member-owned community of oenophiles, has contracted some unusual packaging for some of their wines: Flat-shaped plastic bottles, made from recycled ocean plastic, and recyclable themselves. After conducting a study, the group has concluded that using this recycled PET, and ...
It's pretty disingenious of them to frame this in such a way as to tout the virtues of plastic. We can make rectangular glass bottles and that not only takes less energy to transport but is also more environmentally friendly than PET, but they didn't explore that option or even suggest it to the reader for consideration
Sustainable would be square glass bottles that are reused. Little squat bottles 5 inches tall and by 3 by 3 square from the top. Easy to hold and pour, high packing efficiency.
Almost certainly some hard liquor bottles already made with this specification.
I think this neglects a major reason why most people buy a bottle of wine. It's reinventing boxed wine and it isn't a coincidence that only the cheapest wine usually comes in boxes.
We said the same thing about corks.
NZ (and Australia?) doesn’t really do corks any more. For sparkling wines, yes. But I’ve not touched my bottle opener in years.
We also sell (some?) wines in PET bottles, but they’re usually single serve/hotel-minibar bottles so not mainstream.
If there’s a cost incentive to the winery, and no impact of quality to their product, I think they’ll slowly push for a change.
But first, they’ve got to ascertain it won’t affect the product.
Yep. Also not a surprise that the wine society from the post is neither from Italy nor France :)
I sorta have three not entirely coherent and increasingly cynical feelings about this.
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That's neat! If redesigning bottles helps a little with emmissions then that's cool!
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Even though it might reduce emmisions, sometimes I worry that people think this is what ecological stewardship looks like. "Keep on burning fossil fuels and running an economy based on the exploitation of the earth, just change the shape of your wine bottles and we'll be ok!". We're not ok and this isn't enough, small actions like this don't cut it and we need to hold fossil fuel companies to account for the destruction they cause because it's too late.
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Wait, it's plastic!?!? Are we gonna pretend like CO2 is the only issue and killing millions of fish with plastic a year is something to ignore? Also, doesn't that effect the global carbon heat pump? Seriously, why is it plastic!?!? My only thought here now is that this is some cynical greenwash of a decision that was made to maximise profits and reduce costs.
Pretty solid analysis
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