"The lightweight bottles will make a significant contribution to our target to cut packaging by 25% by the year 2010"
Andy Gale, Tesco category technical manager
Major inroads into glass packaging waste are being made by the UK wine industry which is set to save 6,000 tonnes of glass packaging annually through lightweighting.
The news demonstrates the ongoing success of WRAP’s GlassRite Wine project, which has been working with the international wine supply chain to illustrate the possibilities for using lighter weight glass bottles and increasing the bulk importation of wine into the UK.
Supermarkets Morrisons and Tesco, and wine brand owners Constellation Europe and PLB Wines have all confirmed that they have been working to use lighter weight glass bottles for wine. This involves around 90 million wine bottles and will lead to combined annual carbon savings of nearly 4,500 tonnes, equivalent to taking around 2,500 cars off the road.
This is a good illustration of the environmental effects of successful glass waste minimisation and shows the advantages of the minimisation technique which is ranked at the top of the waste hierarchy.
Commenting on the news, WRAP glass technology manager Andy Dawe said:
“It is great to see the wine industry making such significant progress on optimising packaging which will have environmental, consumer and economic benefits.”
Tesco has been working with Kingsland Wines & Spirits and manufacturer Quinn Glass to roll out lighter bottles for its Tesco branded wines. This move will save more than 2,500 tonnes of glass every year. The new bottles will be on shelf later this year.
Tesco category technical manager Andy Gale said:
“The lightweight bottles will make a significant contribution to our target to cut packaging by 25% by the year 2010.”
Constellation Europe has been developing lighter glass bottles for its Stowells and Echo Falls wines which will save 2,800 tonnes of glass every year.
The new bottles are significantly lighter than the originals, but are not radically different in shape and can be used on the filling lines without any major modifications, according to Constellation
Morrisons working with Corby Bottlers are set to save 200 tonnes each year and PBL Wines is expecting to save 320 tonnes annually through supply of lightweight bottles to another major retailer.
Further information
For more information on GlassRite Wine or other WRAP projects, please contact the WRAP Retail team on 01295 819900, glassrite@wrap.org.uk or www.wrap.org.uk/retail