Cardboard boxes for bottles

TreeHugger spares no expense or our livers in our search to find the greenest packaging for wine. After reading Ruben Anderson's article in Tyee, where he said "Do you really want to try to look your children in the eye and explain that they have to eat jellyfish gumbo because you couldn't resist that lovely imported shiraz?" I started looking for a greener, local alternative.

Tyler Colman, aka Dr. Vino, recently wrote in the New York Times about the merits of wine in boxes; I just assumed he was talking about Tetra-paks, which I am not fond of. In fact, he was talking about bigger boxes, a packaging system known as bag-n-box that is growing in popularity almost everywhere but North America. It holds three liters of wine, the same as four standard bottles, and feels like it weighs about as much as one and a half.

Jackson-Triggs is an Ontario winery that we have praised before for breaking the mold in architectural design, not building a tacky faux chateau winery but hiring a decent architect. They are not the greenest winery, (that is probably still Stratus) but they make a good product. They claim that their "slimcasks "demonstrate our on-going commitment to minimize our environmental impact.

Jackson-Trigg's Claimed Environmental Benefits of Boxed Wine
-3L SlimCasks are equal to 4x750mL glass bottles, so there is less material used.
-Reducing our environmental footprint - It takes 11 trucks to carry the same number of empty bottles as 1 truck of flattened 3L SlimCasks to our winery.
-That represents an 11-fold reduction in fossil fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions to ship the 3L SlimCasks.
-There is less potential for breakage both in-store and at home.
-Less energy is used to produce the cardboard and oxygen-proof inner bag than with the production of glass.

They make no claim on their website that the unit is recyclable, like the tetra-pak people do.

Bag-in-box wine packages are made by Smurfit Kappa, and are essentially a plastic bag with a spout welded on, inside a cardboard box. They claim that it can hold anything from "wine to motor oil".

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