The Primary Path to a Circular Economy
It’s no secret that staying relevant in 2024 demands that wineries, at minimum, publicly communicate their sustainable “efforts,” citing reduced waste and clean energy in the vineyards, production facility, warehouse, tasting room, and beyond. The modern wine enthusiast has their work cut out for them in discerning which of these wineries means business when it comes to sustainable practices, and which ones are all bluster.
Among the best are those brands whose holistic approach to sustainability incorporates fair treatment of workers, protections for native plant and animal life, regenerative farming techniques and an impressive merit badge sash of certifications designed to hold wineries rigorously accountable to their claims.
While all of these are noble and even necessary pursuits, few wineries have yet addressed the wine industry’s heaviest hand in global carbon emissions: wine bottle weight.
Ironically, these emissions come not from the vineyards or the winery itself, but from the energy required for (and byproducts generated by) distributing a needlessly heavy product around the world.
How can this be? What solutions have already been tested, and what can wineries do now to reduce wine bottle weight and, in so doing, minimize their carbon footprint? That is precisely what we’ve set out to uncover in this article.
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Why Wine Bottle Weight is Such a Problem
Glass bottles, it turns out, account for between 30-65% of wine’s carbon footprint, “depending on the winery and location,” according to Dr. Liz Thach, MW. “This is because it takes a lot of energy to produce a glass bottle, and transportation of the filled bottles requires fuel. The heavier the bottle, the more energy is required, and therefore more CO2 is released in the atmosphere.”
Indeed, the negative impact of glass bottles reverberates throughout several key links in the supply chain:
- Production of the bottles themselves – Before being (re)shaped into wine bottles, glass needs to be melted down with a tremendous amount of heat, producing higher emissions and requiring more energy than it takes to produce plastic or aluminum.
- Sourcing – As Sustainable Brands points out in this writeup on cost and emission savings with rPET wine bottles, “upwards of 70 percent of US glass bottling is imported from China.” Moving the production and sourcing of bottles closer to home – regardless of whether they’re glass, plastic, or aluminum – eliminates the carbon emissions generated from shipping bottles across the Pacific Ocean.
- Distribution (Shipping) – There’s a reason your aunt’s ‘93 Toyota Corolla gets better gas mileage than a 2024 Sequoia despite new technology and a hybrid engine; it takes a lot of energy to move heavier stuff.
A natural byproduct of gasoline fuel consumption in combustion engines is the greenhouse gas known as carbon dioxide (CO2). Until commercial transport companies go fully electric or switch to another alternative source of energy, we’re stuck increasing fuel efficiency and minimizing the number of trips needed to reduce emissions. Lighter weight bottles mean less gasoline is consumed to transport the same amount of wine.
- Waste Management – Despite being endlessly recyclable and one of the more stable materials on the planet, less than ⅓ of all glass in the United States is recycled. While we work to influence consumer behavior for the better, looking into alternative materials may be another avenue for waste reduction and management.
A less intuitive ripple effect of unnecessary bottle weight is that it’s also taxing on our biology and, by extension, our workforce. Ask any endurance athlete and they’ll be intimately acquainted with the fact that human bodies require energy in the form of calories to move. The demand that lifting heavy objects places upon muscles means that more food is required to replenish those depleted calories. The production and distribution of our food is also intrinsically tied to our carbon emissions.
More than any other single determining factor, bottle weight represents the lowest hanging fruit available to sustainably minded, eco-conscious wine makers and drinkers alike.
Existing Solutions Now in The Market: Unconventional Wine Packaging
Until someone figures out a way to alter the known laws of physics, wineries are 100% reliant on imperfect containers – traditionally, glass bottles – to get their wines into the hands of thirsty customers.
The question, then, is what sort of container we ought to use, and which materials offer the greatest quality control and protection of the wine inside while remaining as lightweight and reusable/recyclable as possible.
In our quest for a solution that will stick, it’s worth surveying the many innovative strides in packaging that are already challenging the status quo and being tested in the market:
- Aluminum Cans
- Boxed Wine (refillable bladders) for home use
- Wine on Tap (stainless steel kegs) – particularly for by the glass (BTG) servings at restaurants and bars
- Aluminum bottles
- Recycled/recyclable plastic single serving or half bottles
Then, there are the sustainable packaging measures that only supplement traditional glass bottle formats:
- Recycled, recyclable, reusable, and/or compostable insulated boxes or tins for temperature-controlled shipping, convenient transport, or gift boxing
- Lightweight box alternatives for luxury brands (or doing away with the box entirely)
- Labels made from recycled paper or responsibly sourced wood fiber
- Not using decorative foils on the bottle
- Using recycled/recyclable green glass bottles instead of clear glass
- Choosing thinner, lighter, reduced weight glass bottles
- Locally sourcing glass to cut down on transport/shipping emissions
To what extent have these alternative packaging methods sufficiently brought sustainable, lightweight options to the masses? Any one of the above has garnered small wins in niche circumstances, but – for the most part – widespread adoption en masse still eludes even the most popular options like canned or boxed wine.
Why Sustainable Wine Packaging Struggles to Replace Traditional Glass – All Dressed Up and No Place to Go
All these attempted solutions, brilliant as they are, share one critical shortcoming: failure to gain traction over traditional glass bottles. Partial market share is, of course, still progressing, but to see the kind of change significant enough to cripple and eventually offset the industry’s carbon emissions, we need alternative wine packaging to eclipse that of glass bottles under most circumstances.
The Goliath that sustainable wine packaging faces is undoubtedly that of consumer perception. In the opening paragraph of Breakthrough Advertising, Eugene M. Schwartz argues that “[ad copy] cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears, and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already-existing desires onto a particular product.”
It’s a laughable understatement to say that wine drinkers are resistant to change, and for good reason – wine has been revered and enjoyed in largely the same way for thousands of years. Truthfully, we haven’t come that far from the ceramic amphora of ancient Rome and even prehistoric Eurasia.
By all accounts, canned wine should have taken off – it’s sustainable in every way that it needs to be, keeps the wine fresh and protected from sunlight better than glass does, and has a “cool” factor that appeals to younger consumers. Why does it languish on liquor store end caps, in mini fridges behind the bar at hotel pools and music venues while canned beer has taken the world by storm?
Waiting on the World to Change – Why Canned Wine Isn’t Catching On
Efforts to educate consumers about the quality and taste of the wine itself has done very little to help canned wine’s sales. Why does canned wine remain relatively scorned by the mainstream, formidable in its growth yet relatively niche, nonetheless?
While the craft beer community resisted switching from bottles to cans at first, the only real stigma to overcome was canned beer’s history; for the most part, only the cheap stuff went into cans – what we know today as “old man cans” – before 2002. Similarly, canned wine has had to overcome associations with the wine coolers of the 1980s. Long before that, however, consumers were blaming cans for spoiling their wine – as early as the 1930s.
While drinking habits are changing, the role that wine plays in our society is deeply tied to social occasions. Only in recent human history, with the help of a loneliness epidemic, has solitary drinking become so commonplace. Wine’s historical place at the table during meals, splitting a bottle with friends, family, a love interest, or coworkers, lends perspective to wine’s bumpy transition into smaller vessels like cans. This also helps explain wine drinkers’ struggle to understand exactly how much wine they’re purchasing relative to 750ml bottles with the numerous can shapes and sizes available.
Then, there’s the romantic image. Until Taylor Swift cracks open a can of wine during her solemn date scene from “Tolerate It” as seen in her Eras Tour, bottles will remain the universal human language of luxury. When we’re serious about something, the act of opening a bottle of wine timestamps our happiest and most aggrieved moments alike.
For this reason, truly high-end wine is not headed for anything but a heavy glass bottle anytime soon. Marshall McLuhan was right; the medium is the message, and there’s a gravitas to something profoundly expensive and rare enrobed in this symbol of heavy-handed opulence.
The wine bottle alone – not the can, box, or bladder – makes us feel that we are characters in a story grander than ourselves.
Breaking the Mold, Not the Bottle – The Future of Sustainable Wine Packaging
If the wine bottle is too deeply embedded in the public consciousness for alternative packaging alone to make a large enough dent in our carbon footprint, then we need a better bottle. Here at 90 seconds to midnight, in a game of chess with climate change, we may not have the luxury of waiting for consumer demand to catch up.
Fortunately for our planet, luxury brands and cellar-worthy, special occasion wines only represent only a small fraction of what we actually drink and buy. Most wine is consumed by Americans within 2 weeks of purchase. The bulk of the market belongs to everyday drinking wines meant to be enjoyed soon after they’re bottled. Heavy glass has its place in the rare higher-end offering, but it needn’t be our go-to material.
Most attempts to rework the bottle so far have indeed focused on “lightweighting” – reworking certain aspects of traditional glass bottles to try and drop weight without sacrificing too much durability. This could involve any number of several tweaks:
- Developing a mold with a shallower “punt” (the concave divot at the bottom/base of the bottle)
- Changing the bottle’s shape, e.g. narrowing the bottle’s “shoulders”
- Altering the composition of the glass itself
- Relying on glass that’s thinner but well-tempered and annealed
This strategy is not without merit; if most wineries worldwide switched to lighter-weight glass bottles, it would be a responsible first step towards our goal of enabling a circular economy.
Why stop there, though? Why assume glass is the only option that will appeal to consumers? As Betsy Andrews notes in SevenFifty Daily, “Glass furnaces are monster carbon emitters.” Are we really, after all this time, going to keep ramming our heads into the wall, insistent on optimizing a broken model?
There is one controversial material we haven’t yet mentioned – with only ⅓ of the greenhouse emissions.
Plastics Make It Possible with rPET Plastic – Lighter, Shatterproof, and 100% Recyclable
Plastic with a thin layer of glass, technically.
Millennials and older generations will likely remember the “Plastics Make It Possible” campaign by the now defunct American Plastics Council (APC) that aired on television in the late 90s. It’s no secret that plastic has been the recipient of outrage aplenty since then, and for good reason; when not properly recycled, it’s a nonbiodegradable mess. This isn’t your grandma’s plastic, though – unless it was literally your grandma’s plastic, recycled.
The first ever of its kind, developed in partnership with Amcor Rigid Packaging (ARP), BLUE BIN’s 100% recycled rPET (recycled polyethylene terephthalate) plastic wine bottle is making its debut with 750ml of premium sustainable wine protected by a microscopically thin layer of glass (“Plasmax” technology) on the inside of the bottle.
When asked about keeping the design in line with traditional wine bottles, marketing manager for Amcor’s spirits and wine group, Jonathan Jarman, said “echoing that silhouette was critical. You see that shape from a distance and you know that’s a wine bottle. You can’t confuse it with a soda bottle or a juice package.”
Whereas the best lightweight glass bottles only take weight down from about 500 grams to 380 grams, the rPET bottle is only 52 grams – 85% lighter than normal glass bottles.
The best part? Without sacrificing the aesthetics of a typical bottle of wine, these are shatterproof and perfect for outdoor activities or travel.
The Medium is the Message – The Benefits of Lighter, Recyclable, and Sustainable rPET Wine Bottles
This new rPET wine bottle by Amcor Rigid Packaging will only succeed in cutting carbon emissions in the hands of bright, young consumers leading the charge. In the words of our founder, Ron Rubin, the amount of wine produced “will be decided by eco-conscious wine lovers.”
We’re excited to hear what you love most about these new bottles. Will it be the ability to pack more wine in a suitcase without worrying about checked bag weight limits? Taking a bottle of wine to the beach or out on the water? Perhaps it’s bringing a bottle of wine trekking and not having it shatter all over the mountain when it falls out of your pack.
This is an open invitation to other wineries, to join the movement and reduce our industry’s carbon footprint together. If the wine drinking world is ready for a more durable, radically lighter-weight bottle full of award-winning sustainable wine, then BLUE BIN is ready to meet that demand.
