Please Make Drink Responsibly
by Matthew Sparkes, London, UK on 04.13.07
150,000 tonnes of glass could be saved each year, in the UK alone, if the average food and drink container weight was reduced by 10%. The biggest demand for glass packaging in the UK is from the spirit alcohol industry, which uses over 500,000 tonnes of glass a year.
Co-op have been investigating how to reduce the amount of packaging required for these spirit bottles, and are introducing a new, lightweight 298g bottle for it's own-brand whiskey. The design has been developed by Rockware, with funding from the Waste & Resources Action Programme.
Bottle 'light-weighting' has been an area of focus for several years, motivated by cost reduction as well as environmental factors. As bottle walls are made thinner and lighter, they must be made relatively stronger at the the same time, as the thinner the bottle wall, the more likely it is to break. :: LOHAS
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Well, they could just sell refills....
PET bottles, duh!
Okay, let's just return to the old days ... I want to buy my beer, spirits, and wine in barrels that I can bottle at home (if only I had a cellar ... if only more houses were built with them these days).
Refills would be a great idea ... and I know of at least one place in Oxford that can sell refills on whisky.
Personally, I reuse as many bottles and jars as I can ... they are great storage solutions and much cheaper than you can buy!
I always wondered why bars didn't recycle all the bottles people toss out. Isn't there a deposit on them? Seems they could make a pretty penny just on that alone. Not to mention all the glass waste that could be saved.
Or maybe they do. Just seems that everyone throws their bottles in the "garbage".