Recycling
Fine, but glass is fairly easily re-cycled around here whereas the council won't touch plastic film, or even tetra packs come to that.
Pass the wine, dear. Yes, that papier-mache thing
Papier-mache is no longer just for primary school art projects: eco-nuts in Suffolk have decided to start packaging wine in the stuff. You could soon be supping a fine Rioja poured from an oblong paper shell lined with a plastic bag, thanks to British start-up GreenBottle. El Reg doubts this sort of thing will be appearing on …
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Monday 14th November 2011 16:41 GMT It wasnt me
Glass recycling......
Its not really great for the environment. All they do in most places is grind it up for loft insulation.
The ideal i'm sure would be to re-use bottles, but as it is the glass in a glass bottle is only used once for bottles. After that its glass fibres. Thats still not a avery green used of energy.
At some point all the lofts will be full as well.
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Monday 14th November 2011 18:33 GMT Vic
> All they do in most places is grind it up for loft insulation.
Not in the sites I've installed kit in, they don't.
Recycled glass is broken into small cullets which are then remelted to make new glass. This is why the colours need to be separated, and why ceramics and aluminium are major pollutants; if they were just being made into insulation, all that separation wouldn't matter.
> The ideal i'm sure would be to re-use bottles
Probably. But given the potential for liability issues from chipped or inadequately sterilised bottles - or even just the threat of such litigation, even if entirely unfounded - it currently makes no business sense to do that. I hope that situation changes in the future - but given the number of adverts I see for personal injury lawyers, I doubt it will.
Vic.
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Monday 14th November 2011 23:00 GMT Fibbles
Re: Vic
"Probably. But given the potential for liability issues from chipped or inadequately sterilised bottles - or even just the threat of such litigation, even if entirely unfounded - it currently makes no business sense to do that. "
Tell that to the milkman who collects my empty bottles for re-use twice a week.
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Monday 14th November 2011 18:34 GMT Stu_The_Jock
re-use bottles
Ah, the good old days ot taking your Barrs glass lemonade and Irn Bru bottles back to the shop to get your deposit back . . . maybe taking up the Norwegian system is what they need to do. Almost ALL soft drinks come in thick, not squishy, plastic bottles, with about 30p deposit on 1.5litle and 15p on 500ml bottles and 330 cans. All supermarkets have automatic machines that use a combination of weight checks and barcode readers to sort the deposit due and print a voucher to redeem at cashout. Not uncommon to see people coming in with mutliple black bags full, and collecting enough to pay for a a few days shopping.
The drinks cans are crushed in the machine and bagged, bottled loaded onto pallet sized racks for large, and crates for the smaller bottles and sent to be cleaned and relabeled and refilled.
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Tuesday 15th November 2011 08:53 GMT Trygve Henriksen
re: the norwegian system...
The deposit is 1NOK(8.6p at todays exchange rates) for 330/500ml cans(and those farkin small cans they sel Red Bull and other poisons in), and for most 500ml glass and plastic bottles.
The 1.5L plastic bottles, some 750ml bottles for water and of course large beer bottles all have a deposit of 2.5NOK(about 21.5p)
The swedes also use a similar system, and even have similar marks on the cans and bottles, but the small(330/500ml) cans there are only worth half as much.
(Less really, as their Krone is less worth... )
It's by no means a large sum, but on the days I ride my scooter to and from work, keeping my eyes open means that it usually pays for the gas...
Black bags? I assume you mean bin liners... ;-)
Yeah, and they usually come in when the store is at its busiest, fill the receiving part of the automat so that it stops and sets of the alert, then get angry when the overworked cashiers won't leave the register(where there are long queues) to empty the machine...
There's no solution so good that someone can't make a problem out of it...
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Monday 14th November 2011 18:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Glass recycling.....
Agreed. Standard size is the future. When I am king there will be standard size glass bottles of say 330ml, 500ml, 750ml, in a variety of colours. And if you make a drinkable liquid - it goes in one of these standard bottles. These would be made by companies and sold to food producers to use to bottle their product. These could easily then be returned, cleaned and redestributed back to factories.
Each bottle would not be embellished with any logo or branding so could be reused by any company.
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Monday 14th November 2011 22:54 GMT TheOtherHobbbes
You don't understand
Because this is a bunch of wool-wearing be-hatted green hippies, The Reg has to get its hate-hour on and say that it's very, very bad.
Because green people never get anything right. You know all that stuff we've been saying about nukes and solar and all of that? It's all completely wrong - because it *just is*.
Always. It has to be, because - er - well, who knows why. But I'd guess someone either Has Issues, or they're being paid to write this stuff.
Which is great and all. But never mind that the glow-in-the-dark hacks on the Reg were crowing that Fukushima was perfectly safe and barely an accident at all - and now even BBC News is admitting that Cesium 137 levels are unsafe for farming over around half of the Japanese land mass.
So does hippie-hating atom-fondling Team Reg feel like moving to Japan now?
No. I'm guessing really not. Not even slightly.
(But I digress.)
Anyway - yes, it's drink in cardboard. No, it's not a new idea. I think one or two people may have seen it before.
And this is, as usual, a pointless and silly green-hate piece of non-journalism with no real purpose or value.
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Tuesday 15th November 2011 00:22 GMT Charles Manning
It's bloody Greenwashing
The idea has been done before, but here are some folk trying to attach a Green label to it and thus con the Great Unwashed into buying the product.
Apart from anything else, the major environmental impact of wine is in the wine itself. Fiddling with the packaging will never make it Green.
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Monday 14th November 2011 22:57 GMT Fibbles
re: paper milk bottles
Pretty much. Unfortunately for the eco types though TetraPak have a whole mountain of patents covering their waterproof cardboard containers. What I understood from the article was that GreenBottle were simply producing cardboard boxes with sealed plastic bags inside to hold the wine. I'm not a wine drinker myself but I'm pretty damn sure I've seen this sort of thing in Sainsbury's before containing cheap plonk. The only discernible difference I can think of between that and GreenBottle's product is that these new cartons use recycled cardboard (even then I'd be surprised if existing boxes of wine didn't use recycled cardboard to keep costs down).
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Monday 14th November 2011 16:03 GMT Voland's right hand
Too late
Bag in box already does that. It also keeps wine in better shape once opened because there is no "new" air intake when pouring out so the wine does not oxidize. If you like a glass once in a while it is definitely a better choice than a bottle because you can drag out the bag (in the box) for a month and will not go bad (especially if it is in a fridge).
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Monday 14th November 2011 16:20 GMT Scott Broukell
<please recycle this title>
In the 70's weren't the ingenious Dutch delivering milk in 1-litre plastic bags. You popped the bag into a more solid container designed to hold it snuggly and snipped the spout off with scissors. No energy wasted collecting and washing the much heavier glass bottles and plastic is cheaper to recycle than glass any way. AFAIK this was reasonably common in other European countries at the time. I never understood why the Brits shunned the idea. Even now the common plastic milk bottles in use have to have a cap and collar and label. None of that is needed with the bag system, printing is easier as well. Just a thought.
Granted, you do need to have the 'holding' container to hand, so it's not that portable outside the domestic, kitchen, scenario. But one solution might be to achieve rigidity through inflating air sacks around the main container ? Look, if i give it a blow job it stands up on it's own - sort of thing (oops!)
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Monday 14th November 2011 16:25 GMT fridaynightsmoke
Wow, what a novel and groundbreaking idea
I mean, packaging wine inside a plastic bladder, held within a cardboard container. Maybe next they can imagineer a 'jumbo' version that holds 3 standard bottles of wine (to further reduce the carbon footprint per L), and maybe even make it a cuboid shape so it takes up less space on trucks, shelves etc. A box of wine eh; extraordinary!
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Monday 14th November 2011 16:26 GMT Timo
boxes of wine - high class
We've been able to get boxes of wine here on the left side of the pond for some time. Although they're not the finest they are still drinkable and great for cooking where you may only need a cup of something white. I most recently scored 3 liters/litres of red Spanish wine for about $USD 15 that took up much less space than it would had it been 4 bottles, and the waste when done was almost nothing. In theory since the wine bladder collapses as you drink it there is less chance of exposure to air so it stays fresher and lets you pour a glass at a time.
Vintners sometimes try to stretch the comfort zone of the public, so we'll see some of these advances with juice boxes of good wine, etc. They'll get there eventually.
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Monday 14th November 2011 16:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Seems like a good thing
Although possibly not as good as the traditional, reusable (as opposed to recyclable) milk bottle?
Yes, glass is recyclable, but manufacture and recycling are inefficient processes and more energy is used at each recycle. Cardboard comes from a renewable resource and can be composted - natural recycling. The difference between this and a Tetrapak is that the waterproof lining can be separated for recycling/composting of the outer bottle - whereas Tetrapaks have to go to landfill (in my area anyway). So yes, seems similar to a normal wine box, but possibly a different cardboard construction for better composting?
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Monday 14th November 2011 17:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
What we need...
... is a way to encourage people to hand the bottles back to the shops for recycling. Maybe, for each bottle sold, a small charge can be applied. We'll call this a "deposit". when they hand the bottle back, the "deposit" will be handed back.
Joking aside, why don't people do this in the UK anymore? Why did the producers move over to plastic bottles?
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Monday 14th November 2011 22:59 GMT Yet Another Commentard
Why don't they do this any more...
I understand, as a fellow commentator above alludes to, that the issue is one of branding. When you are buying your "beverage experience" the bottle's branding must match the drink. So bottles have particular shapes and swirls on them. That way you will not mistake brand A for brand B because the bottle would be the wrong shape. This is obvious on, say, gin bottles. Of course many people could just use an arcane skill called "reading the label" to see what the contents are. Due to all these bottles it is, apparently, not cost effective to sort out which one goes back to which producer, it's just easier to smash them up and melt them down.
The chap/chapess above has it right. Everything should go into a "one size fits all" affair. I would change the theory a bit, so you'd have brown bottles for beer (I think that helps stop light damage the contents), green for wine (including fortified), clear for spirits, and a different shaped clear for soft drinks. You use the bottles the Government says (hell, do it from Europe so the whole darn continent has to abide by it), or you do not sell your product here. Each bottle has a 50p or £1 deposit on, and is rinsed and reused, not smashed and melted.
Not only is it greener, but you'd get kids actively collecting bottles from the hedges rather than dumping them there. And rioters might think "oh darn, I say, that's £1 I am about to lose" before making a Molotov. Okay, the last one is a flight of fancy.
When I was a kid there was this really nice chap who used to deliver milk in bottles to all the houses. In return we would give him money and empty bottles which he would take back to the dairy. There they would be washed and rinsed and refilled with nice new milk. What's more he had an electric vehicle that was charged overnight on the cheap rate electricity.
And we call this nonsense ecological progress?
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Monday 14th November 2011 22:59 GMT OutwithReality
Funnily enough...cork is eco-friendly and composts...
But don't take my word for it...
http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/cork_oak/
"These [cork oak] forests provide a vital source of income for thousands of people and they support one of the world’s highest levels of forest biodiversity, "
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Monday 14th November 2011 18:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Given...
... that plenty can't even be bothered to flatten an empty milk or juice carton, why would anyone bother stripping apart this thing?
'Sides, often enough you'll find that even where there are a separate collection channels in place --something which itself isn't exactly free either-- often enough the end result is everything getting dumped in the same trash incinerator. Which may or may not be preferrable to (even separated) landfill. Seems like there's plenty to be done to make this recycling thing actually work, as opposed to only seem to work to placate the greenies' sensibilities.
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Monday 14th November 2011 18:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Not as much fun to dispose of...
I like my wine in bottles, much more fun when throwing them into the canal - great distance and a lovely splash when they hit the water. Cardboard has no distance and floats on the water, creating an unsightly mess.
Besides, only yobs & winos drink wine out of cardboard boxes...
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Tuesday 15th November 2011 13:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Actually
Tetra-Pak cartons are now collected for recycling from the kerbside by many councils. There is a map on their web site which can help you find the best way to recycle them.
Interestingly, I only found out that my local council will happily recycle Tetra-Paks by phoning them and asking them about it.
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Tuesday 15th November 2011 07:11 GMT Tom 7
When I was a kid...
tetrapacks was cardboard and wax, all completely recyclable - and even better you could just stick a pencil through the bottom and have a nice plantpot that you could start your parsnips off in and just stick straight in the ground and not worry.
But progress has made them re-useless.
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Tuesday 15th November 2011 13:17 GMT squizzar
Fair point...
Good point. Why is the plastic 'bonded' to the cardboard? If it was a separate bag inside the cardboard it would be easily separable (possibly even mechanically - just cut round the spout and pull the bag free).
The cynic in me expects that it would probably cost a couple more pence a carton though. Fortunately the poor the supermarkets won't mind because they can push that cost onto the immensely profitable dairy farmers...
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