Do you like your vino red, white or green? Borough Wines’ bring-your-own-bottle service cuts cost and carbon drastically
By Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Gone are the days when most Brits regularly washed out glass bottles, the pinta ones for the milk, and left them on the doorstep for the milkman to collect. Gone, too, are the bring-back schemes that – where I grew up, at least – allowed kids to supplement their pocket money by returning empty soft-drinks and beer bottles to the local shop to be cleaned and used again.
But, if recent developments in East London, in the London Borough of Hackney, are anything to go by the environmentally friendly and oddly reassuring refillable glass bottle is not dead yet. Over the past couple of months, residents of one corner of Dalston have become accustomed to the clink-clink sound of people walking down the street clutching empty bottles ready to be refilled. But this time the liquid is question isn't milk or lemonade, but something altogether more exciting: wine.
The refill scheme, launched in the new branch of Borough Wines, has proved a runaway success, accounting for around half of the wine sold in the shop – far more than the owners expected when they opened their doors earlier in 2011.
And it is not hard to see why. The scheme offers red, white and rosé wines that would sell in a conventional single-use 75cl bottle for around £10. But if you bring your own bottle and fill it up from the barrels in the corner of the shop you get a whole litre for £6 – a saving of more than 50%.
From what I can see this must be the first such scheme in the country, if not in Europe or even further afield and can but be applauded.
Financially, then, it's a no brainer, but what about the environmental benefits? How much carbon can a scheme like this save? Not much in absolute terms, perhaps, but relative to other ways of purchasing wine the difference is substantial.
The estimated environmental footprint of a typical bottle of wine at around 1kg. Manufacturing the bottle of the bottle accounts for a third of that total, and transport and storage – which are made much less efficient by the weight, bulk and shape of the glass bottles – account for almost another third.
Even, I would suggest, the recycling of used bottles in new bottles will not reduce its footprint very much if at all. We must here consider the carbon used to collect the empties, to transport them for remaking, and then the remaking of the old bottle into a new one.
That's why wine purchased in a box has less than half the environmental footprint of wine bought in a bottle. But while boxes are great in principle in terms of cost and carbon, the wine available in them at supermarkets isn't usually very good, and the boxes are difficult to recycles as they are lined with a foil.
The new refill scheme solves that problem. The shop buys high-quality wine in large boxes, decants it into barrels (which are, disappointingly, only for show) and then sells it at bargain prices in handsome air-tight bottles that look just as nice on the table as normal wine bottles.
It is such a step forward in terms of price, let alone in terms of the environment, that one can be but surprised that wine refill schemes are not more common.
Such schemes have always been popular in France, apparently, but, it would appear, the only comparable scheme in Britain is the one at the same company's sister store in Borough market.
Let's hope that other companies can be encouraged to step out into the world with similar ventures.
© 2011
