Yellow + Blue Wines Expands Its Use of Sustainable Tetra Pak Cartons
by Sara Novak, Columbia, SC 
on 11. 9.08
photo: Yellow + Blue
Yellow + Blue is expanding its use of sustainable Tetra Pak(R) cartons to include its Torrontes varietal. After the success of its Malbec in the Tetra Pak packaging, the brand of organically grown Argentinian wines has decided to wrap up another varietal. Read on to find out about why Tetra Pak is so sustainable.
Yellow + Blue will now offer both its Torrontes and Malbec wines in sustainable Tetra Pak packaging. The company already uses natural, sustainable processes in its vineyards and ensures not to use pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. In fact, Yellow + Blue wines are certified organic throughout the entire growing, winemaking, and packaging process.
Now Yellow + Blue wines has gone a step further with the expansion of its Tetra Pak packaging.
Tetra Pak Sustainability
According to Yellow + Blue, its cartons use 92 percent less packaging to deliver the same amount of wine as traditional glass wine bottles. According to a Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) study conducted by Franklin and Associates, wine bottles use much more energy and emit more greenhouse gases than Tetra Pak or PET containers. In addition, Tetra Pak cartons are lighter, take up less space, and can be more efficiently packed into fewer trucks. The Tetra Pak manufacturing company in Denton, Texas reduced energy consumption by 27 percent. Today, the company's use of electricity is offset with electricity certificates.
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Oh, please stop the agony. Or at least explain how a package made from intermingled layers of materials that can't be easily separated and are usually thrown away can be called sustainable. Sure, it is lighter than glass, but glass can be washed. Glass can be made into more glass. Tetra Paks may use less oil to ship from halfway around the world right now, but will we care about that when oil is too expensive to use to ship wine that far.
Sustainable is about things that can be sustained. Local beverages in refillable botles is sustainable. Tetra Paks are not and never will be.
Please read my article on this topic at http://thetyee.ca/Views/2008/03/11/OldBottles/
Don't forget that the tetrapaks:
don't shatter if you drop them,
Don't need a corkscrew,
fold flat for discarding,
you can squeeze the air out of them once they are open to make the wine last longer,
You can put a bunch of them in a bag and not worry about breakage,
they are easier to close than a cork bottle,
They have a larger printable area than a regular wine bottle, so you could put more info about the wine and company on it,
They are more efficient to ship needing no packing material and are lighter weight and have nearly no wasted space in a carton.
Less shipping breakage.
They require less energy to make and recycle.
filled with air they make a passable pillow.
While sustainable packaging is always a good thing, I do have to wonder how this plays into the whole cork forest issue.
from Ruben Anderson in Tyee:
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?
but they aren't recyclable, at least in my area.
Yay, Ruben!
This article reads like an advertorial for Tetra Pak... did they pay to get this garbage printed here, or is it another example of churnalism?
Where I live, their idea of recycling glass is to grind it up and put it into asphalt for paving roads!
So it is relative to the current situation. TetraPaks are better than glass ironically - due to down cycling and long distance travel.
But the future can be different. How about local beverages sold by tap. Bring your own bottle?