No Surprise Here: 'Glass Is Greener,' Says Glass Lobbyist
In response to Tyler "Dr. Vino" Colman's essay on boxed wine, Joseph J. Cattaneo says:
Without a doubt, glass bottles are greener than wine boxes.
Calculating a carbon footprint based solely on trucking capacity is myopic and fails to consider the carbon costs for extraction and manufacturing.
Just envision the various elements that have to go into creating a wine box. It involves many more steps, materials and energy inputs than are required for making a glass bottle.
As for recycling, most communities can handle glass, which is 100 percent recyclable. Good luck finding programs that handle wine boxes.
The choice is clear: glass is greener.
Setting aside the biases of the messenger (Cattaneo is from the Glass Packaging Institute), does this message ring true to you, serious eaters? Have you had trouble recycling wine boxes?
Photograph ©iStockPhoto.com/trigga
Related: Boxed Wine Now Eco-Friendly, Less of a Joke
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8 Comments:
This is the first thing I thought of when the previous article was posted. Without any statistics it's impossible to say anything in confidence, but it seems to me that the shipping costs in glass will never equal up to the plastics and cardboard trees that the boxes take. How many plastic things does the average person come in contact with in a day? I don't think that yet another disposable package is such a great idea. That's before you consider how many re-uses glass bottles have even before they're recycled and used again. That wine box is re-useless even before it doesn't recycle well.
phlyingpenguin at 12:42PM on 08/22/08
I don't buy wine in boxes, but recycling would depend on the community and the people who pick up the recycling. Some don't take any sort of paperboard or cardboard, and a waxed or other coating on the box could also make it an issue. Also, food residue would make it non-recyclable, so that would mean people would have to rip it open and take out the plastic thing that the wine is encased is so there's no food residue with the paper. Yes, you could do that, but how many people will do that?
You could certainly put the wine box in with your recycling, and the recycling police wouldn't knock on your door. But in a lot of cases that box is going to get sorted out of the stream and sent to a landfill if the recycler isn't equipped to handle that material or if there are suspected contaminants.
dbcurrie at 1:00PM on 08/22/08
I agree with everything he said.
simon at 1:13PM on 08/22/08
Indeed. The bottle is 100% recyclable - glass, cork, foil, paper. The box is not - unless there is some way to recycle the plastic spigot and the mylar bag that I'm not aware of.
cjstephens at 4:49PM on 08/22/08
Well, he's just doing his job. I mean, what else would the President of the Glass Packaging Institute say? It's pretty unlikely he's an economist, a mathematician or a scientist who suddenly — eureka! — became passionate about putting stuff in glass bottles as the solution to saving the planet.
I'm not an economist, a mathematician or a scientist either, but I do buy both bottled and boxed wine and recycle as much as possible. My $0.02:
- Shipping is a major factor. An empty box of wine weighs much less than a single empty glass wine bottle, probably by half. And most boxes of wine are equivalent to four bottles. It simply takes more energy to ship bottles around.
- All the boxed wine I've seen is domestic. Has anyone seen boxed wine from France? Maybe it exists, but I'm sure shipping a box from California is less extravagant that shipping four bottles from Australia or Argentina.
- I can (and do!) recycle the cardboard box. Are there places in this country where you cannot recycle cardboard?!?
- This blog entry made me think about reuse, which comes before "recycle" in the motto "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". Here are some reuse ideas:
http://www.recyclethis.co.uk/20080331/how-can-i-reuse-or-recycle-wine-box-bladders
kurteye at 9:06PM on 08/22/08
@kurteye, just because you put the box in the recycling bin, it doesn't mean it actually gets recycled. Your recycler may pull it out of the recycling stream because they can't process that particular material, or it might get pulled because there's no market for the material.
The more sophisticated the recycler is, the more materials they can handle. And as far as the market for the materials, you also need to factor in shipping costs. If you're close to a mill, it doesn't cost as much to ship the scrap paper products there, but if you've got to cross they country to find a buyer, it might be cheaper to landfill the material.
In theory, all paper should be recyclable, but there simply aren't buyers for some types of paper. Neon-colored paper, for example, is among the things that can't be recycled in my area. Neither can frozen food boxes, paperback books, drink boxes, paper plates and a whole list of other things that you might think are just fine.
And yes, there are places in this country where some types of cardboard can't be recycled. Until recently, corrugated cardboard wasn't recycled here. That has since changed, but I'm sure there are still areas where it's being landfilled.
dbcurrie at 12:19AM on 08/23/08
Hold on -- shipping glass around is definitely worse than shipping paper and plastic around. And the glass has to get to the winemaker SOMEHOW, so it too is being shipped twice. In this case, boxes win.
Secondly, boxes take up less space once they're full of wine, and in this case, boxes win again.
On the recycling front, glass is the clear winner.
On the reuse front, it might be a tie. Here's my thinking: people *may* choose to reuse their empty wine bottle, but how many of those do you really need? One? Two, max? After that, they go straight into the recycling, and the reuse argument is dead.
Also, wine keeps longer in a box than in glass (since air can't easily get into the plastic pouch they way it can get into the bottle), meaning that less wine is wasted. If each bottle of wine is drunk only 90%, with the last bit getting dumped because its gone "off", then all that glass shipping to the vineyard, then from the vineyard to the store has gone for naught. Here, boxes win again.
Although i can't recycle the plastic IN the box, i feel because of the additional pluses here, that box wine is more eco-friendly than bottles.
mh330 at 11:29AM on 08/25/08
Let's hit each of the topics people have mentioned....
Shipping empty packaging to wine producer: In the same space you can fit 2000 unfilled bag in a boxes or 72 glass bottles.
Use of green raw materials: Post consumer materials can be used in the cardboard, glass and plastic. You'd have to check with your specific product to find out if they are actually using it but it's definitely available. There are also biobased plastics (meaning renewable source and biodegradable product) used for the bags, if you choose to pay for it.
Total use of packaging material: Obviously much less material is used per ounce of wine in the bag in the box option.
Shipping packaged wine: While the bulk of the weight when shipping the product comes from the wine, bag in a boxes are stackable on their own so you get much more wine/cubic ft of truck space.
Product preservation: The bag in a box package is much more durable in transit, resulting in less damaged packaging during delivery and less loss in transit. Then there is the longer shelf life after opening that someone else mentioned.
Recycle/Reusability: Yes, you could probably put stuff around your house in used wine bottles but do you? Cardboard is definitely recyclable, I am not sure where dbcurrie gets that it is not. Maybe in some very small town it is not but I have lived in a number of small towns (ie town pop 15k, county pop 30k) where it has always been recyclable. Even if it isn't, cardboard is biodegradable. There are recyclable and biodegradable options for the bag, depending on what you choose.
princexy at 9:57PM on 09/04/08