Organic wines have been around for a while now, and so an organic wine company is no big deal but how about one that is green too? Yellow+Blue is a certified organic wine that is environmentally responsible. Even their name is green, afterall what do you get when you mix the colors yellow and blue? Green of course!
Eco-friendly packaging
Yellow+Blue organic wines are shipped
responsibly and packaged smarter, we’re talking 93% wine and 7%
packaging, this results in a low impact on the environment and high impact on the
palate. Wine has been around in Europe for years in a box, but Yellow+Blue don’t package in a box, it’s a Tetra Pak, this is the same packages in which milk or juices are packaged and shipped. The Tetra Pak wine cartons are not a new concept. All across
Europe, Canada, and South America, even in wine-passionate places like
Italy and Argentina, Tetra Paks have been embraced for their
environmental friendliness, their portability, and their practicality.Tetra Paks are eco friendly for many reasons, one is their shipping capacity, they are rectangular so no space is wasted (unlike bottles). Shipping is considerably less as the weight is product and not the glass bottles. Consider: A case of wine in glass weighs 40 pounds and holds 9
liters of wine, close to 50% wine and 50% packaging. A case of
Yellow+Blue weighs 26 pounds and holds 12 liters of certified organic
wine. It’s a win-win for lowering the carbon footprint of the company and the consumer. The downside is the Tetra Paks are not made from recycled content, and I hope that is something they look into in the future, however 75% is made from responsibly sourced well-managed forests. The wood is first used to make houses and furniture and the leftover wood chips go on to become paper products used in Tetra Paks. I hope to see some recycled paper content in the future though!
Low Carbon Footprint
As the Yellow+Blue website states, the carbon footprint of the wine industry is huge. Items like glass bottles, cork, labels, fuel, pesticides, chemicals… it all adds up.
Transportation is a giant
contributor to wine’s overall carbon footprint, and it is here that
Yellow+Blue takes a step in the right direction. They purchase wine from
the wine makers before it’s bottled, ship it in bulk via insulated
steel tanks to North America, where the cartons are filled and then
distributed. Dr. Tyler Colman who has helped to create a carbon footprint
calculator specifically for the wine industry, crunched some
numbers to compare the carbon footprint of Yellow+Blue against
those of a more traditional wine business model. Yellow+ Blue’s carbon footprint
turned out to be almost half the size (54%) of the traditional model.
Recycle
As we all know glass bottles can be recycled, and it appears that now so can Tetra Paks. Once it’s been re-pulped, a carton can come back as tissue
products. Tetra Pak has come a long way since they started carton recycling programs in the US in 1999. Today, 20% of the total US residents across 26 states (and growing) have access to carton recycling. Globally, 25 billion packages were recycled last year. For a list of communities with carton recycling, click here. I checked the Tetra Pak recycling site and it looks like my city is behind the times on this one, so I’ll still be buying my wine in glass bottles, for now at least!
