189188 Lean + Green Lightweight Wine BottlesO-I

The Lean + Green Lightweight Wine Bottles are designed to save 20,000 tonnes of glass a year and are 18 per cent lighter than conventional wine bottles.

A glass of wine a day may be considered good for you, but its glass bottle is bad news for the environment. Bottles consume raw materials during manufacture and energy in the course of the bottling and distribution process. When you throw the bottle away, it creates waste that needs to be recycled.

Yet a fine vintage remains a source of pleasure, so a vast number of bottles are shipped across the world. They are the most common form of packaging used by manufacturers. About 90 per cent of wine packaging consists of glass bottles. At a global level, the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) estimates that this is equivalent to 8.5 billion tonnes of glass.

In view of growing retailer and consumer demand for sustainably produced and packaged wine, the glass manufacturer O-I has introduced its Lean + Green lightweight wine bottle range. The breakthrough success in the traditional realm of the wine packaging industry stems from O-I’s holistic view of sustainability and challenging environmental standards. O-I was committed to designing wine bottles that would deliver long-term value for customers. In collaboration with the marketing department, an internal team of designers applied the latest technology to produce bottles to optimum levels of lightness, while retaining the appearance and function of the heavier bottles they replaced. Studies by research and consultancy company Ipsos concluded that the tapered shoulders and height proved key for consumers at the point of sale.

The company used a process called ‘Narrow Neck Press and Blow’, originally perfected in the 1990s for smaller

beer bottles and refined in recent years to include the larger 750 ml (26.4 fl oz) format wine bottles. The process enables the better distribution of glass in bottles, allowing for lighter weight designs to meet glass strength specifications of customers.

O-I has reduced in size three tiers of glass bottles: Reference (Prestigious Wines); Caractere (Premium Wines) and ECO (High Value Wines). The Reference has dropped in weight from 550 g (20 oz) to 460 g (16 oz), the Caractere from 460 g (16 oz) to 410 g (15 oz) and the ECO from 400 g (14 oz) to 345 g (12 oz). In 2011, it will launch an even lighter, Bordeaux-style container for cork and screw-tops, with a weight of only 300 g (11 oz).

As well as achieving a sustainable design through a reduction in weight, the Lean + Green bottles are made with a high level of recycled content and label protection. Usually divisions and sprays are required to protect bottle labels. But the in-built label protection of these lightweight wine bottles has removed the necessity for secondary packaging, and thus lowered their environmental impact. At the end of their life cycle, the bottles are fully recyclable.

Between 2009 and the end of 2011, O-I will have produced over 650 million Lean + Green lightweight wine bottles in Europe alone, saving more than 40,000 tonnes of glass and over 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Equivalent versions of the eco-friendly containers have been produced for the Australasian, North American and Latin American markets. The bottles thus preserve both the wine inside them and the environment around them. Nicola Homer

O-I— Perrysburg, OH USA— 2009–present

The Bordeaux-style bottles (opposite) are ultra-light and weigh in at 345 g (12 oz) and 460 g (16 oz) respectively, while providing the same proportions of the traditional wine bottle (this page).