Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Our Smokey Green Bottles

Earth Day seemed like a good time to write a bit about our packaging and shipping.

Foils - We don't use them. They serve no purpose and are 100% decorative. They are not generally recycled.

Corks - We are a drop off winery for Recork America:

http://www.recorkamerica.com/

You can either drop your used corks with us or at the winery and we will package them and send them in to Recork America to be recycled. You can also mail or ship your corks back to us. We'll take any cork, not just ours.

Bottles - Are recyclable of course. We use the lightest bottle possible to cut on shipping costs and fuel use. They are smoke colored, not green, but they are as 'green' a bottle as you can get.

Packaging - We ship in 100% recyclable pulp and cardboard. Styrofoam is not recyclable. We don't buy it. We will accept your used Styrofoam shipper from other wineries though to re-ship. At least it gets one more use and stays out of the land fills a little longer.

When we started out and made all these packaging choices we were not really making a direct effort to be 'green'. At each point we just tried to make what we thought was the right decision and making sure things are recyclable and the environmental impact was as important in the choice we made as any factor. The sum of little choices though has added up over the last 5 years.

1 comment:

Stefania said...

I don't always tell Paul everything, but he's noticed the new trash liners I'm using. I got them at http://www.biogroupusa.com/

They claim "BioBags will decompose in a controlled composting environment in 10-45 days, leaving no harmful residues behind."

So far no drawbacks, no problems with tears or leaks, same trash odors as before. For a liner in the kitchen, this beats plastic.