Drinking Outside the Box: Juice Boxes for Wine
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 04.20.06
We are not quite sure about juice boxes for wine. It is very popular in Italy, and Three Thieves Bandit wine from California is purported to be better for the environment than bottled wine. Certainly it costs less to transport- "the wine industry is stuck in the dark ages" says one of the winery's founders. "Most wine is sold in packaging that weighs more than the product inside and needs a special tool to open" Although we are not certain that the tetra packaging is more recyclable than glass, he has a point. We also like the fact that up here, 50 cents for every package sold is donated to Ontario 's Kortwright Center to help finance a new frog habitat. ::Three Thieves via ::The Star
We note that Toronto environmentalist Gord Perks points out in a letter to the Star after the article was published: TetraPaks are not green compared to effective recycling- letter below the fold.
Once again looking green trumps being green. Thursday's Star extols the virtue of buying Three Thieves' wine in Tetra Paks. A portion of the purchase price goes to helping the bandit frog, and the container is purportedly green in its own right. Wrong.
Saving frogs is a good thing, which is why we need better endangered species legislation. But saving frogs can't disguise the LCBO's anti-green container strategy. Last year the provincial recycling rate for Tetra Paks was less than 13 per cent. In 2004 only 30 per cent of LCBO glass bottles were recycled back into bottles or fibreglass.
Contrast this with the more than 95 per cent rate for beer bottles. The difference? Deposit return. The rough handling and mixed materials in the blue box cause different coloured bottles to break and mix. This consigns them to wasteful uses such as roadbed or landfill cover. Instead of addressing the problem head on, our government-owned retailer tries to shift attention away with an endangered frog tie-in.
Tetra Paks do even worse than the abysmal recycling record of glass. Most municipalities eschew collecting this package because its three layers (plastic, paper, aluminum) make it extremely difficult and prohibitively expensive to recycle.
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thanks lloyd. it's actually grossing me out to see the 3thieves wine ads ("drink a wine, save the planet.")
and while i love the kortright center (the only puveyors of Analog Forestry eductation in Canada) its a lame trade-off. better to donate directly to the K.
...and i would love to see where that 13% is being recycled. 'Cause it certainly isn't at the donmills recycling center (the one that does glass metal and green-bin waste) nor at the ajax centere. 0% tetrapacks there.
like you )& the stoar) write, deposits work on beer and would work on wine. Do we need any more astroturf??
In a flyer for another tetra-pack wine last year, they were also trying to use reduced transportation as argument. (More tetrapacks fit in a truck, eg. less trucks are needed.) But in reality, every store will still be visited by at least one delivery truck per delivery day, perhaps just not as full. Perhaps this makes a difference at the very early stage of delivery from factory to distribution centre, but not so much after that.
If you have the room & local laws don't prohibit, why not make your own wine? You don't necessarily have to make it from grapes, you could make it from berries or other soft fruit too.
With this asceptic package post and the DIY food articles, I'm surprised TH has yet to post at least one post on soymilk machines/tofu recipes.
in nyc we can throw tetra packs into our recycling but not wine bottles.
The whole wine box thing seems alot like milk cartens witch take up way too much space in landfills. They should put the wine bag like the ones used for school milk.
yeha well what u can throw into your recycling bin and what gets recycled are kinda worlds appart, dug.... here in toronto you can throw #1,2,3,4,5,6 & 7 plastic into the bin (as well as glass wine bottles, which actually do get recycled) but as for #3,4,5,6&7 even though they get collected, they then get sorted and then get sent to landfill. I don't know about new york, but up here its the same fate for the tetapaks
It's important to remember that "sustainability" is the key to environmentally-friendly packaging. Recycling is the most obvious part of sustainability. But you also need to consider things like the reduction of energy and materials needed to make a package and whether a package is made of renewable resources. And, the costs (including environmental cost) of shipping and distributing products is another important factor. When you consider all this, a Tetra Pak container is much more environmentally friendly, even considering the lower rate of recycling.