Best Foot Forward
Carbon Accounting
Ecological Footprinting
Sustainability Consultancy
Tools
Training
Business Case for Sustainability
Carbon Footprint
Ecological Footprint
Policy Context
News
In The Media
Partners
Publication
Clients and Case Studies
Contact Us
Staff
Our Story
BFF Blog
Pinot plastic - wine industry rejecting glass?
Thu 04 Sep 2008
BFF has been closely involved with assessing the environmental impacts of wine packaging, having completed projects for WRAP on bottle lightweighting and comparing PET to glass. Our studies found that reducing the weight of a particular material leads to a significant reduction in a bottle's carbon footprint, but reducing weight by switching from glass to plastic does not necessarily achieve carbon savings.
However, Packaging News this week reports one producer that is moving from glass to plastic - and claiming an associated 40% reduction in the carbon footprint of a bottle. BFF would be keen to review these calculations but we have been unable to find detailed reports to substantiate the figures presented. Perhaps even more interesting is the article’s reference to using aluminium – a very carbon intensive material – to make bottles instead. No comment is made in the article on the footprint of the aluminium bottles.
We hope all of these decisions have been underpinned by robust carbon footprint measurements which, crucially, have: drawn boundaries to include the full product life-cycle; used appropriate accounting rules and applied consistent assumptions when comparing packaging systems.
RSS Feed