Today the team here at Ethical and Green discovered that screwcaps on wine bottles have a larger carbon foortprint than the traditional cork ones. The reason the wine industry had to move away from cork was due to a worldwide shortage in cork and therefore it was not sustainable to continue using it. Most producers have now switched to screwcaps and some admit that they did not look into the carbon footprint before jumping aboard the revolution.
Some figures
The French closure company Oneo Bouchage has calculated that producing screwcaps gives off in excess of 10.6kg of CO2 per tonne compared to only 2.5kg tonnes of CO2 when producing corks. This then is a huge difference.
The composite DIAM produces 4.3Kg of CO2 per tonne.
So what to do?
This is clearly going to be an issue for the wine industry. Once official regualtions come into play regarding reducing a companies carbon footprint they will have to look more carefully into packaging. Who knows in the future we may all drink wine from cartons?!
For the consumer all we can do at this stage is keep recycling our wine bottles and the screwtops. We’ll keep you posted if we learn any more about how the wine industry is dealing with this issue.
