Latest features Wine: plastic versus glass bottle?

Date Published:

06/03/2008

You're after a glass of vino, whether it be from box, bottle or bowl. But which will leave a smaller (albeit unsteady) carbon footprint once the bottle’s empty - plastic or glass? Wine blogger, Jamie Goode, of Wine Anorak gives us a measure of both sides

Each year, around 18 billion glass bottles are filled with wine. If an average bottle weighs around 500g, you don’t have to be a maths genius to realise that this makes up an awful lot of glass. However, glass is recyclable. Indeed, each week you can see how well your neighbours are drinking by taking a sneak peek at their recycling container - although anyone looking at ours and not realising that I’m a wine journalist would be extremely worried about the consumption levels in my household.

10 green bottles

Unless you've been hiding in a cave without any media intrusion for the last year, you’ll have noticed that green issues have seized the public agenda. Everyone is talking about carbon footprints, offsetting, sustainability and food miles. And the wine trade has been caught up in all this: despite the fact that glass is recyclable, there's widespread concern about the carbon footprint of wine bottles. This is because glass is heavy, and a good proportion of these 20 billion bottles are transported long distances by road and sea. Consequently, there's been a lot of discussion about replacing glass altogether, or at the very least reducing the weight of the bottles used.

Chateau Neuf du Plonk

Bag-in-box is a long-standing alternative to glass, and it’s an economical way to ship wine, because a pallet of bag-in-box wine holds 80% more wine and is less than two thirds the weight of the equivalent volume of glass-bottled wine - thus reducing the carbon footprint. One drawback of bag-in-box is the bag material allows some oxygen in, and this can result in reduced shelf life. Another is that it looks a bit tacky buying a 3 litre container of branded plonk. Bag-in-box is a niche with a strong following, but it's unlikely to make much more of a dent in sales of glass-bottled wine.

Plastic fantastic

The latest development in packaging is the appearance of standard sized (75cl) plastic bottles on supermarket shelves. Some people think that in the near future we’ll have given up on glass altogether and we’ll be buying our wine in plastic. So far, two plastic-bottled wines, a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and an Australian Shiraz Rosé, have been launched by Sainsbury’s, and Australian producer Wolf Blass has launched two of its Green Label wines in plastic.

These plastic-bottled wines look weird, if you ask me. They are much smaller and lighter than normal glass bottles. The plastic used is called PET (polyethylene teraphthalate), which is treated with an oxygen barrier to enhance shelf life. Potential advantages of plastic bottles include weight (a 75cl glass bottle weighs around 400–500g; the same size in PET weighs 54g, making transport more efficient), robustness (PET bottles don’t break, which makes them safer and easier to transport) and size (they are considerably smaller). They aren’t as easy to recycle as glass, though: even though most local councils in the UK have facilities for recycling PET, you need to take your bottles to them rather than have them collected. But aside from the fact that they look odd, convincing people that plastic is the environmentally friendly option will be difficult.

Shipping lighter, smaller bottles reduces their carbon footprint through savings in the transport chain. As an example, the UK consumes around 1 billion bottles of wine each year, and estimates are that reducing the bottles for all these to the lightest available would save around 90 000 tons of CO2. If this is coupled to bottling in the UK, with bulk shipment of the wine in large tanks, then the savings are magnified because around double the volume of wine can be shipped in bulk per container compared with bottled wine.

Will plastic bottles catch on? No one seems sure, yet, although several large wine companies are investing in bottling facilities for plastic. It’s a question of waiting and seeing how consumers respond. Personally, I’d be surprised.

A light wine

In the meantime, there's quite a push towards what is known as 'light weighting', which refers to reducing the average weight of glass wine bottles in an effort to lessen their carbon footprint. The average bottle weight is currently around 500g, whereas the lightest 75cl bottle weighs around 300g, so there is plenty of scope for saving weight. Leading wine journalist, Jancis Robinson, has even taken to naming and shaming wine producers who use extravagantly heavy bottles for their top wines. One producer recently criticised for having heavy bottles responded by stating (ironically) that Jancis Robinson is flying round the world telling people to use lighter bottles. Clearly a weighty issue.

Cork versus screwcap – another debate dividing wine experts around the world. Get the lowdown here.

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