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The London Wine Fair has teamed up with the non-profit organisation The Porto Protocol and the British service provider Sustainable Wine Solutions to launch a new initiative to collect and reuse wine bottles. Around 30,000 bottles of waste glass will be collected at the fair, which takes place from 15 to 17 May. Following this, they will first be categorised by bottle type, label and country.
Hannah Tovey, director of the London Wine Fair, told the online magazine Drinks Business: "We will produce a report at the end of the fair looking at the opportunities and challenges of reusing bottles rather than recycling them." The results of the analysis will be used as a benchmark for future progress and to raise awareness in the industry.
Organising the project was not easy, he said. "It took a lot of planning, down to details such as the right containers for the used bottles at the fair. In the past, it didn't matter if bottles were broken because they were crushed and turned into sand in the recycling process anyway. But you can't reuse broken bottles, so we had to approach the process completely differently," explains Hannah Tovey.
Carbon emissions from the production of wine bottles are the single largest contributor to overall emissions in the wine industry. The recycling rate is currently 70 per cent. This means that 30 per cent of wine bottles end up in landfill. In response, several leading wine producing countries in Europe have already introduced quotas for the reuse of packaging such as wine bottles. Portugal has passed a law requiring 30 per cent of all packaging material - including bottles - to be reusable. The scarcity of resources caused by the war in Ukraine and rising inflation are also contributing to increased pressure on producers.
(ru / Source: Drinks Business)