The drinks sector is awash with new packaging formats and fibre-based options are in fashion. They certainly have potential but let’s not forget reuse, says Tim Etherington-Judge.
Diageo last week launched a trial for its 70cl paper-based bottle for Johnnie Walker black label. It’s been a long time coming (the bottle was first slated for 2021 if you remember) so this feels like a big moment in packaging for drinks.
And it’s worth asking: are these a viable, recyclable, sustainable, and appealing option? In a word: Yes. And as ever there is a ‘but’.
Innovation is welcome. Our industry has lacked any truly ground-breaking packaging development since brands – concerned with tampering by unscrupulous tavern/pub owner – shunned a highly sustainable circular system of selling reusable wooden barrels into venues and switched to individual bottles sealed at the production site. These bottles were exclusively made of glass until the invention of PET plastic in the 1940s.
Today we are seeing true innovation in our packaging and it’s genuinely exciting for our industry. Are any of these solutions perfect? No, but they are definitely a big step forward in our mission to reduce the carbon intensity of alcohol distribution. And they are giving the other packaging materials pause for thought.
Glass production is intensive in energy, water, and sand. Glass furnaces are almost exclusively powered by fossil fuels. It can also take up to 40 litres of water to produce a single bottle, and a virgin flint glass bottle will be comprised of about 75% sand, another material that we are over-extracting. Glass is also extremely fragile, extremely heavy, and takes 4,000 years to decompose. Drinks brands that rely on glass will know just how much carbon it accounts for in their overall GHG emissions.
There is a lot of work going on to reduce the impact of glass, from hydrogen powered furnaces to increased recycled content, more efficient production facilities, and of course, lighter bottles. These advances are fantastic and producers should explore all the options and innovations of the glass bottle industry.
Paper, or plastic, bottles have much lower emissions, are less fragile, use less water and no sand in their production. It’s no surprise to see some wine brands embracing plastic PET bottles, for example, especially when they can use 100% recycled PET. The way that plastic decomposes is of great concern however, and drinkers still perceive it to be the worst option.
Aluminium is a mixed bag. Virgin aluminium is on par with glass for its GHG emissions due to the extensive impact of mining and processing the metal. However, recycling aluminium is extremely efficient, with about a 90-95% energy saving making recycled aluminium arguably the best material from a sustainability perspective. As Footprint reported recently, there is a lot of interest in using aluminium for miniatures on flights – but only if they’re made from recycled aluminium.
So, can paper-based bottles compete with plastic, glass and aluminium?
For many applications, absolutely they can. Do I want to see Macallan put a 50-year-old whisky in a paper bottle? Of course not, because there will always be products where glass should remain the number one choice. But for drinks that are consumed within a couple of years from the date of production, then alternative formats with lower environmental impacts should be adopted.
Does paper cut it?
The best bottles are the ones where the materials can be easily separated – such as the Frugal bottle – and recycled effectively. We use the Frugal bottle at Avallen and whenever we run samplings, the public interest is always in the paper bottle. They love the light weight, sustainability and the full-bottle design. Is it a perfect solution? No, but it is a step forward and we should embrace progress rather than waiting for perfect, because perfect never comes.
Where materials are bonded or layered together, such as Tetrapak, then recycling becomes considerably more complicated, expensive, and inefficient. Some of the other paper bottles being developed by the likes of Paboco and PulPac have thinner plastic liners, and the debate around their recyclability is very much a live one. Questions around their recyclability must be answered before they reach any kind of scale, not least because these consortiums are backed by global brands that use millions of bottles every year.
So, fibre is in with a chance. But only in the single-use space. When we have these conversations about competing materials we can forget what often comes out as the most efficient and sustainable option: reuse.
Indeed, where glass strikes back is in its viability in circular systems, such as ecoSPIRITS, where it can be used over and over again, reducing its impact per use every time. Circular systems will always be better than any improvements we make in our existing ‘take, make, use, lose’ economy.
We need fewer conversations about the next single-use innovation and more about how to embrace circular systems where bottles are reused over and over again. We used to have such systems. And now we have people arriving at our homes more than ever before from Amazon, Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and any number of other delivery services. Surely, it’s not a huge step that we start demanding that these companies also collect rather than just deliver?
Tim Etherington-Judge is co-founder and chief sustainability officer at Avallen Spirits, headquartered in France, and co-founder of consultancy Avallen Solutions.
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