These entrepreneurs want consumers to reuse wine bottles

Courtesy of Good Goods Close Authorship Americans aren’t the biggest wine sippers in the world — imbibing a mere 3.2 gallons per person in 2020 versus the 16 gallons guzzled by Portuguese residents, according to estimates from the industry’s primary source of stats . But the habit still translates into a whole lot of single-use bottles: About 4.3 billion of them, many of which find their way into landfills or ( maybe ) into some sophisticated recycling system where they can be processed and resold along with other types of glass. While glass is highly recyclable, only about one-third of what American’s throw away annually is actually handled that way. So it shouldn’t surprise you that life-cycle assessments suggest that the largest percentage of the industry’s footprint is related to this heavy, single-use packaging. Depending on who you ask, from 1 pound to 2.7 pounds of carbon dioxide is emitted for the production associated with a wine bottle. What’s the alternative? Alongside newer formats such as cardboard boxes and cans (a matter for another story), there’s growing interest in refill models. Over the past year, two New York-area companies — circular containers startup Good Goods and "wine on tap" […]

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