Time to get off the bottle before its too late.

(Photo by Sylvain Robin)
I’ve been doing some research to get my head around just how big a problem excessive packaging has become for the wine industry. And the findings aren’t good.

The belief that every drop of wine we consume must be served from a bottle has got to come to an end … and soon. While research into the numbers for Australia is not easy to find, ample research has been done in the USA, and it’s frightening.

A few years back Barry Dugan wrote a seminal report for Wine Business Monthly, on the state of glass waste in the USA wine industry and found, “The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that the recycling rate for wine bottles is about 20 percent. That means an estimated 80 percent of glass wine bottles end up in U.S. landfills.

“With 330 million cases of wine sold in the U.S. in 2010, that translates to more than 3 billion wine bottles being dumped in landfills each year. Assuming production of a typical 750ml wine bottle emits about a pound (0.9kg) of CO2 emissions (CO2e), those discarded bottles are the equivalent of the greenhouse gas emissions of 284,607 automobiles, or the emissions from the electricity use of 180,985 homes for a year.”

Inside the café and restaurants of the USA, sustainability reporters at TriplePundit found that, “Wines sold by the glass account for up to 80% of wine sold in restaurants, which equates to approximately 600 million bottles per year.” So based on Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calculations that’s the same CO2e as 12,000,000 tree seedlings grown for 10 years … yep a bloody great big forest.

Glass recycling in Australia is not much better than then the USA, with most of the wine bottles we chuck in the yellow bin, never being recycled. Sustainability Victoria found that in their State alone, 62,000 tonnes of glass waste go to landfill each year. Of course, that’s not all wine bottles, but to get an idea of the scale, that tonnage is the equivalent of about 50 million, 750 ml wine bottles.

Wine Australia reckons that 130 million cases of wine are sold in Australia each year, which is a bit more than a third of the US volume. That means that if we enjoyed bulk wine sold on tap, instead of by the bottle, we could remove the same amount of CO2e from the atmosphere as 60,000 homes generate over a year; and that’s the size of your average regional city.

Now, we’re not going to change the world today, but when an estimated 60% of the carbon footprint for wine comes from the bottles, then changing our preference to tap wine can make a huge difference.
(Photo by Sylvain Robin)