In this episode of weekly gupshup, Sreepriya Sridharan & Piyush Dhawan bring to you a circular business model from the wine industry.

What if we tell you that your wine bottle can fit through a letter box? Yes, you read it right!

Say hello to the next age packaging by Garcon Wines who have innovated a sustainable wine packaging solution.

In 2017, they won the Best New Beverage Concept Award at the World Beverage Innovation Awards and was a Diamond Finalist in the awards for Packaging Innovation the following year!

So what do they do different? Garcon Wines introduced a customized wine package that could accommodate ten of its bottles in the same space as four conventional ones. This allows 1040 bottles to be stored in a standard container pallet, compared to 456 standard sized bottles, reducing the environmental footprint and cost for transport and handling by around 60%.

Flat wine bottles are a stand out design especially when those bottles are made from recycled plastic. To us their product speaks volumes about their attention to detail around a green and efficient supply chain.

Today in the vast world of climate science, relatively little attention has been paid to the wine industry’s carbon footprint. Tell me honestly, did you ever think about this before?

We need to remind ourselves that wine is an agricultural product. Wine grapes are extremely sensitive to climate and this is what makes its taste so exquisite!

But this sensitivity makes it equally vulnerable to climate change.

You know a report by Spanish company Grupo ARCE found that the average bottle of wine releases about 1.28 kilograms of carbon into the atmosphere over its lifetime.

For some of you, this number might seem small, however In the year 2018, global wine production rose to near-record highs, reaching a harvest of 292.3 million hectoliters that’s more than 7.7 billion gallons.

Water is an essential raw material in addition to grapes, fruits and wood used for making barrels. It is clear how this industry is heavily dependent on natural resources and therefore building in circular business models to improve product efficiency becomes crucial.

Probing Question : Did you know that climate change is rapidly altering wine as we know it?

Tune into the episode to dive deeper into their solution.

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Links to our profile:

Sreepriya Sridharan | Circular Business Podcast;

Piyush Dhawan | The Circular Collective

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