Which Is Greener, Wine Bottle or Box? Neither.
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 08.14.08
Typical green imagery for tetra pak wine
In Ontario, Canada, the government-owned Liquor stores have been pushing Tetra Paks as eco-packaging, claiming a much lower carbon footprint in manufacture and transport than the traditional glass bottle. They even claim that they are recycled, although I suspect they are just going through the motions; you don't get much value out of pulping seven layers of plastic and paper. I called it greenwash, but after Jenna found a life-cycle analysis showing that tetra-paks were better than new glass, I thought the issue was settled.
That is, until TreeHugger emeritus Ruben Anderson gave me a slap upside the head with his article in the Tyee, " New Wine in Old Bottles", pointing out that it is just like the paper or plastic issue: the correct green answer is that neither new glass or tetrapak is green, reuse and refilling is.
In Canada we all drink our beer in refilled bottles, nobody has a problem with that. So why not our wine? in Europe, they do.
Ruben writes "French wine bottles average eight refills, but let's temporarily forget that that magical place exists. The Husch family vineyards in California used to refill bottles, which they purchased from a bottle washer called Encore! (The exclamation point is, how you say, sic?)."
He then goes on a glorious rant that I will copy in full, because it is too good to edit:
"While looking for wine in refilled bottles I had the misfortune to see one of those shrill displays of wine in Tetra Paks; this crap is being flogged as a "Green Solution." It's junk like this that drives me to the liquor store in the first place. Tetra Paks are here to save us because they weigh less, so less climate-changing diesel fuel is required to lug them across the ocean from Australia. Dear God, where to start?
First, even if you can get the drunkards off their lazy asses to join the mere quarter of the North American population that recycles, few places recycle Tetra Paks. Second, the places that say they recycle Tetra Paks are liars. What does "re" mean? It means again. Can a Tetra Pak be made into another Tetra Pak? No. Tetra Paks are seven incomprehensibly thin layers of paper, plastic and aluminum. The poor suckers who try to recycle them use giant blenders to mush the paper pulp off the plastic and metal, then they need to separate the plastic from the metal. What idiot thought this would be a better idea than washing a bottle and refilling it?
But the biggest problem is actually the same problem -- jackasses. When did it become okay to destroy the climate and kill 50-90 per cent of living species so we could drink imported wine? How did it become possible for us to think we could have whatever we wanted wherever we wanted it? Do you really want to try to look your children in the eye and explain that they have to eat jellyfish gumbo because you couldn't resist that lovely imported shiraz?
Mark my words, the first North American winery to start marketing mismatched, reused bottles is going to turn a lot of heads. Imagine a case of pinot noir in stubby Chianti flasks, narrow Alsace bottles, perhaps a flattened Bocksbeutel. What chaos! What excitement! So, wineries: start refilling bottles, and then send me a case. I think I deserve it. And even if I don't deserve it, I need it." ::The Tyee
It gets sillier. We now have deposits on wine and liquor bottles in Ontario, and they all get returned to the beer store, with eight decades of experience in collecting, washing and redistributing bottles among the breweries, so the system is already in place to do this. Here is a challenge to our local wineries: try it. I will buy it and suspect a lot of others will too.
More on Box vs Bottle in TreeHugger
Eco-chic: Greenwashing from the Liquor Store
Hitting the Bottle or Hitting the Box? The Debate Continues
Drinking Outside the Box: Juice Boxes for Wine
Greenwash Watch: More Greenwashing from the LCBO :
French Rabbit: Savor the Wine , Save the Planet
Follow @TreeHugger on Twitter & get our headlines with @TH_rss!
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Glorious rant! Bring on the refilled. I'll drink to that.
i agree 10 billion percent, reuse is the key!
Preston Vineyards in Healdsburg sells jug wine on Sundays - customers bring their glass bottles to be refilled. Head on over!
Which beer companies in the US are re-using bottles? I suspected none of them are, but maybe it is more common than I thought.
I bottle my own wine, using bottles Ive bought over the years, even had friends and family give me theirs as theyre done with them. $.10 deposit vs. $1 replacement cost made it a no brainer for me. Im sure ive used some of the same bottles 8 times or more, and as long as i remember to clean them immediately after use (while still somewhat sober) I havent had to purchase any new wine bottles. I did it more as a cost saver than with anything 'green' in mind...but more and more, i find the 'green' way is the best way to save money too.
"In Europe, they do."
I find this "in Europe, it's all so amazing" thing somewhat amusing, it seems to make an appearance somewhere in any eco-related story. Things must be really f**king appalling in the US, because they're not great over here...
I don't know about wine - in Germany and Luxembourg (where my parents live) I don't think wine bottles are reused that much, although beer (as well as soft drink) bottles almost universally are.
But what really hurts me: This isn't done AT ALL in the UK. Bottled beer is the premium stuff, and they're single-use, as are wine bottles; regular everyday (but still good) beer, as well as the cheap undrinkable stuff, is all canned. Now, I recycle the cans whenever possible, but I'd still rather be returning empty bottles to be reused. Not to mention everything else coming in single-use plastic bottles. AND the beer is much more expensive here than in Germany.
Julius,
"But what really hurts me: This isn't done AT ALL in the UK"
Not quite true. In the UK, well Scotland, Barrs reuse glass bottles for Irn Bru. You get 20p back when you return bottles.
Aye, its only for soft drinks, I guess there could be problems encouraging kids to collect beer and wine bottles.
I really wish the soy/rice/alternative milk came in glass, instead of the aseptic Tetra.
To the best of my knowledge, having worked in 6 or 7 bottling plants, modern bottling lines cannot handle filling varying shapes and sizes of bottles, so simply filling any bottle that comes back is not really an option, outside of the fill-your-own type places or very small manually operated bottling places (if those even exist).
I also seriously doubt there will ever be a standard bottle for wine, although I fully agree that that would be the most ecological option. I would love to see that happen, but don't think I ever will. Marketers would have a heart attack! How would they be able to differentiate their product using only a different label, with everyone using the same bottle?! Gasp!!
Even with the beer industry in Canada, the standard bottle agreement is in constant jeopardy of being nixed each time the marketing department of one of the big 2 breweries starts to get restless and wants to use a new bottle for "product differentiation". Instead they import beer just so that they can get around this agreement and have the beer be put in a different bottle. Of course, if people just didn't buy these imported beers in pretty bottles, then there be no reason to import them. I, personnally, will only buy beer in the standard industry bottle, when given the option.
Also, a word of warning, not all bottles can be refilled with a pressurized liquid, as they are not all strong enough to withstand repeated re-pressurization. This is why single use bottles are lighter than the ones that are meant to be refilled.
Argh! I could rant all day about this situation, but I will spare you. In short, I think:
refillable bottles = good,
single use bottles = bad
Tetra Paks = worse
It is possible to reuse your bottles easily in Quebec. The SAQ has a few points where you can bring your own bottles and fill them up yourself (it's actually pretty fun). It's a great way to reuse your bottles and it's cheaper then buying pre-bottled wine.
Glass is a reassuring old friend, and the concept of reuse is also very attractive. This is why many people instinctively feel that packaging in returnable glass bottles is just the right thing to do. The energy used in transporting glass bottles is much much greater than most people realize, however.
In the LCA referenced in the article, the researchers found that just the one-way transportation of the glass bottles from winery to distributor (for domestic wine distributed within the US) uses 2.13 million BTU per 1000 liters. The total life-cycle energy use for Tetra Brik Aseptic is only 3.26 – that includes material production, container production, secondary packaging, waste management, and transportation.
If you included the transport of those glass bottles back to the winery, the transportation energy would at least double -- the same bottles must travel the same distance again to get back to the winery. Then, the distribution transport energy use alone, for returnable glass bottles, is greater than the total life cycle energy for the Tetra Pak system: 4.16 compared to 3.26. That means that even if the bottles can be reused infinitely many times, and the washing and re-labelling consume no energy at all, returnable glass bottles would still use more energy than aseptic cartons for wine in the US.
Locavores will argue with the transport distance assumptions made in the LCA. The transport distance used was 1500 miles – the average distance of a US wine distributor from Northern California. Wine is one of many products that cannot be produced just anywhere, though, and the entire US population of 300 million can never be fed 100% with local (i.e. less than 1500-miles-distant) agriculture. Total food miles per person per year should and will be reduced in the future, but the world will still need green solutions for long-range food distribution to feed all of its people. The aseptic carton was specifically invented for long-range distribution of liquid foods, and it is a wonderful solution for that application.
The world is changing fast and it takes clear and careful thinking and a little effort to get to the bottom of complex issues – old beliefs are not always reliable. Ranting might feel good to those who are sure they are right, but paranoia and polemics are turn-offs and will not win hearts and minds.
I am always so interested by the comments on this sort of post. As I was just commenting on Lloyd's follow-up to this post, there is a big difference between green and sustainable. Green is less bad, but is not necessarily sustainable. Sustainable means it can go on forever.
Life Cycle Assessments can help make choices between two Green things, or between two Sustainable things, but are useless to choose between green and sustainable. They are apples and oranges.
Shipping wine in tetra-paks is founded on cheap oil and a climate that won't change. Sadly, the climate is changing and we are running out of oil. I would rather spend my time doing LCA to choose between two sustainable ventures, and not bother with the merely green.
It is an excellent point that absolute sustainability must be the goal.
However, I think it is unrealistic to think that there will be no global distribution of goods in a sustainable society. We will be able to afford the energy needed, and the size and geographic distribution of human population will require it.
A simple calculation helps put the energy used for packaging and transportation in perspective. In the wine packaging LCA, the total energy use to package and ship 1000 liters of wine in Tetra Pak cartons in the US is 3,26 MBTU. This converts to just under 1 kW-hr per liter package. That is equivalent to keeping a 60W light bulb lit for 17 hours, or maybe 3-4 times as much energy as it would take to boil the pasta to go along with the wine.
There are not enough sustainable ventures to choose from today to support all human life. We can work together to improve technology, laws, and culture to change that, but no one alive today can say they live in a way that is totally sustainable.
We must make green choices on the way to sustainability.
In BC wine and beer bottles are recycled (beer reused because they're all the same, well mostly) all others are crushed. I'm that, in fact, the glass is recycled and has many uses... so I guess there's a business there, which employs some folks. To me that's an okay alternative.
I know if anyone wants to get this started, but maybe we could have a letter writing campaign or petition encouraging Ontario vineyards to start using refilled wine bottles?
I certainly would be in favour, and I think if we could get a bit of a critical mass going to show them this would be viable, the practice might actually take off.
I know currently in Quebec, you can bring wine bottles to SAQ (their provincial liquor store) depots and refill them for much cheaper costs. As well, in Ontario, "make your own" wine places require the consumer to bring in used wine bottles. When you book your time slot to make your wine, they advise you on how many bottles to bring in, and how to properly wash your USED bottles for the occasion.
Just a little quibble,
"How did it become possible for us to think we could have whatever we wanted wherever we wanted it?"
This belief is actually quite longstanding. It's called colonialism and not only has it been historically (and currently) responsible for killing our planet, colonialism is also responsible for historical and current genocides against specific populations across the globe. I mention this because I feel it's extremely important to tie our green activism into issues of historical and current colonialism since it's the starting point for the exploitation of the planet, animals, and people. Let's not pretend it's a new practice for settler populations and Europeans to demand whatever they want whenever they want it, irrespective of the consequences to others.