You may not be thinking about the carbon footprint of your wine while you’re sipping away, but the footprint is driven up quite a bit by the shipping of the full glass bottles themselves! Australian wine brands Banrock Station and Taylors Wine are addressing this by being the first to launch the innovative eco-flat wine bottle.
Accolade Wines, who launched the eco-flat bottle two years ago in Europe, is on a mission to improve the sustainability of the wine industry and has ambitious targets to advance circular economy packaging across its entire portfolio. Banrock Station has 25 years of sustainability heritage through their production efforts, vegan friendly blends and now even lighter and more recycled material bottles. The potential for the eco wine bottle to improve the carbon footprint for winemaking is also important for Taylors Wines particularly given that viticulture is one of the most climate-sensitive agricultural businesses, and as we know Australian bushfires, drought and flooding have hurt wine growers over the last few years.
So what is so special about the eco-flat bottle? Well, the bottle is made entirely from Australian-sourced 100% recycled PET plastic. Which is helping to reshape the carbon footprint of wine by targeting the industry’s environmental hotspot, the glass bottle. Using recycled PET also saves weight during shipping and with the bottles being 83% lighter, emissions in transport are reduced as well as the energy in production and recycling to further tackle greenhouse gas emissions. The slimmer, flatter profile allows twice as many bottles to fit in a standard wine case which means it’s much more efficient to transport. Of course the bottle is also fully recyclable once you’re finished too.
While the shape of the eco-bottle is a departure from the traditional round wine bottle, Packamama’s chief executive and founder Santiago Navarro is confident the time is right for Australian winemakers to respectfully challenge a couple of centuries of tradition.
“Australia is globally recognised as a leader in wine packaging thanks to break-through innovations, including bag-in-box casks and screw-top caps for wines, and we are highly motivated to launch our climate-friendly bottle at Coles with Accolade Wines and Taylors Wines,” Mr Navarro said.
Eco-flat bottles are available exclusively through select Liquorland and First Choice Liquor stores.
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