Right you are, akew. Glass is inert compared with plastic. Holds the product longer and glass is recyclable (in theory. What’s up with those wine bottle mountain ranges, eh?).

Two ideas. One, we find a better use for old bottles. There’s talk of using crushed glass as filler under roading, but a better use might be bottle as building material. For example, this Oz dude is using 13,500 bottles to build a wine cellar (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/03/recycled_wine_b.php). So, a lifetime of drinking and you might build your own home!

Secondly, take a leaf from the Fill Your Flagon scheme and reduce the level of packaging. Have bulk delivery of wine in 100 litre casks or so to the retailer. Consumers bring their own bottle and fill it. It wouldn’t be universally applicable, but the bulk of the empties would go.

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kahikatea

Good on yer

Now if we could just get people to understand that out of season fruit and veg come from overseas, and that we don’t really need strawberries in August in the Southern Hemisphere, we could probably halve the cost of airfreight as the demand would be so much lower!

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Actually the emissions from shipping something like wine that doesn’t need to be transported quickly are pretty negligible anyway. I bet the courier who took that bottle of wine to Strings created more carbon emissions than that boittle’s share of the emissions from the ship that brought it from Europe.

Don’t worry about emissions from shipping wine around the world. The fact that rolled oats bought in a supermarket in Gore are trucked from a warehouse in Christchurch, which gets them by train from a mill in Dunedin, which gets them by truck from a field near Gore, is probably a rather bigger source of emissions.

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presumably even lower emmissions per litre could be obtained if they transported the plastic bags naked & packed them into boxes once they reached their destination

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stopwhaling said: They somehow seem to get empty rather quickly compared to a ‘box’.

Yes, that is a major disadvantage. More wine should be bottled in jeroboams.

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# akew Says:
August 20th, 2008 at 10:35 am

> Using casks instead of bottles is a short term solution. In the long term it makes more sense to drink local, to use a container that can be re-used many times, and to get winemakers to reuse bottles.

yep, but you’ll have to get them to agree to a standardised bottle design to do that.

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Carcboard casks, the only problem is the plastic bladder, locally we don’t recycle some grades of plastic.

It’s a significant problem though, stopwhaling. Try keeping your plastic and burying it in your own backyard (as opposed to someone else’s aka the tip) and you’ll see how significant it gets

I also think there are health issues associated with plastic and food, especially soft plastics. And the acidity of wine may make that worse.

Using casks instead of bottles is a short term solution. In the long term it makes more sense to drink local, to use a container that can be re-used many times, and to get winemakers to reuse bottles.

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My point is that I didn’t actually think it was funny Owen.

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Toad,
Get a life and you might see a joke when it stares you in the face.

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Nah Toad
Just gazing at the bottle which the nice courier man delivered this morning! I love surprise birthday presents! Don’t you?

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You drinking at 8.58am, Strings? Bit early for me I’m afraid.

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Goodness. If it wasn’t my Gold Card birthday I doubt anyone would have sent me this bottle here Toad.

However, I still suggest to you that, if EVERYTHING was judged on its TRUE carbon footprint, and nothing else, our lives would be very different to what they are, and our civilisation would be envying those of many countries in central and north Africa – who have almost no carbon footprint, or quality of life, at all!

(PS. And you still can’t get a decent domestic red at a decent price)

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Strings, I too enjoy the occasional bottle of imported red – note my reference above to my celebration bottle of Château Pétrus when France announced it was ceasing nuclear testing.

Just as I enjoy the occasional overseas holiday.

But in the context of carbon footprints, I’m suggesting its best things like this are special treats, rather than regular occurrances.

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>
>>check out the label for the origin of the grapes. If something is a mix of Chilean, Australian and South African grape sources, there are carbon emission implications in that before the wine is even bottled/boxed.

I don’t care!

Life is about more things than carbon footprints. Little things like enjoyment and pleasure come into play as well!

There are VERY FEW decent red wines produced in NZ from local grapes, and those that are are so over priced as to be ridiculous.right now I’m looking at a y2k (that’s vintage 2000) bottle of Chateau d’Ampuis Cote- Rotie which I intend to empty one Sunday with a nice piece of dark red meat. It was shipped from France, in its very own polystyrene container, via air-mail. It will now go into my wine storage area (under the spare bed) to calm down and relax after its journey. I expect it to be sumptuous, with chew-ability and a distinct personality. De-corking and decanting it will be a bit of a ritual that will add to the pleasure of its consumption.

You can’t get that from a plastic bag of fermented domestic grape juice!

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They somehow seem to get empty rather quickly compared to a ‘box’.
Seriously though from production-transport-filling- dumping or re-using [do they?] or sending them back to be melted down seems rather an energy wastefull system. Carcboard casks, the only problem is the plastic bladder, locally we don’t recycle some grades of plastic. Someone must have found a use for them???? They are too small for camping pillows but do make great water containers [until you sit on one too hard!].

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What’s wrong with wine bottles?

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Casks for me everytime – I just love to see those high class women look down their noses when you dump it on the counter. Anything that gets rid of wines bottles has got to be good. O apart from sparkling wine in casks of course – which the Irish found had a few problems.

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Owen- it should be easy enough to make the taps modular so that they can be re-used. Then the only problem is the whole tetrapak thing.

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I’m so disappointed, I thought this was going to be about someone producing wine in wooden barrels.

This is a no-brainer. Drink wine that is produced closest to you. Doesn’t matter what it comes in, although sorry I am never going to drink wine from a plastic bag (for so many reasons). Better yet, drink organic local wine.

I hate these carbon calculations because they are so one dimensional. I really want to see the total footprint of a pencil not just the carbon one

btw Frog, I thought corks were better because it supported the sustainable growing of cork trees in Europe.

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musbee said: Then again, since both these casks are Australian, whereas most of the bottled wine I drink is from NZ

Yep, you’ve got a point musbee.

Drink local!

Occasionally, splash out on a bottle of Château Pétrus, or what else takes your fancy, musbee. But if you drink wine regularly, the Green solution relates to the cliamte impact of getting grapes and wine to the consumer.

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