Supermarket to sell wine in plastic bottles

Wine will be sold in recyclable plastic bottles instead of glass in Sainsbury's supermarkets as part of a trial, the retailer announced today.

Sainsbury's said the move will reduce carbon emissions by cutting the weight of wine packaging. A plastic bottle is one-eighth the weight of a regular 400g (14oz) glass bottle.

UK consumers buy around one billion bottles of wine every year, using around half-a-million tonnes of glass. Reducing the weight of wine packaging to 54g (2oz) by using plastic bottles could reduce carbon emissions by around 90,000 tonnes, according to the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), which is involved in the trial.

"That's equivalent to taking 28,000 cars off the road for a year," said a Wrap spokeswoman.

Wrap will assess how successfully the plastic bottles can be recycled and will measure the environmental impact of the scheme.

Wrap said that until its environmental analysis was published next month, "it is not in a position to compare" the energy use involved in recycling a glass bottle versus a plastic bottle.

Sainbury's will initially sell an own-label New Zealand sauvignon blanc and an Australian rose in the plastic bottles. The wine will be bottled in the UK, allowing nearly twice the amount of wine to be transported in each container. Bulk shipping also reduces carbon emissions.

Barry Dick, product technologist for beers, wines and spirits at the supermarket said: "The new wine bottle looks exactly the same as a glass bottle, holds the same amount of liquid and doesn't compromise the quality of the wine in any way."

The recyclable 75cl plastic wine bottles go on sale at Sainsbury's early next month, priced at £4.99 for the sauvignon blanc and the Australian rose at £3.99.

Sainsbury's move comes after Waitrose announced last month that it will start selling milk in plastic pouches. The Waitrose announcement came following concerns that plastic milk cartons threaten the environment

Article Source: guardian.co.uk

China's Demand For Recycled Wastepaper: A Blessing And A Curse For The World's Forests

China's paper industry has built-up a massive recycling capacity that is shielding forests worldwide from destruction by supporting a strong international market for wastepaper as an alternative to pulpwood, according to a new report released by Forest Trends, a leading international forestry organization.

The Forest Trends report, Environmental Aspects of China's Papermaking Fiber Supply, notes that today about 60 percent of the fiber used to manufacture paper and paper board products in China is derived from wastepaper--a substantial portion of which comes from the US, Europe, and Japan. In the last ten years China's wastepaper imports increased by more than 500 percent--from 3.1 million metric tons in 1996 to 19.6 million metric tons in 2006--with most of that growth occurring between 2002 and 2006.

But the report warns that wastepaper alone is not sufficient to keep up with China's production demands, as high quality pulp and pulpwood are also being used to supply international buyers with high quality paper. The report finds that the same explosive growth that's created such a strong market for wastepaper is also boosting China's demand for pulp and pulpwood from developing countries already struggling to contain illegal and destructive logging. For example, China today buys some of its pulp and pulpwood from Indonesia and Eastern Russia where illegal, environmentally rapacious logging is widespread. And any increase in demand could exacerbate problems in those regions.

"China is by far the world's biggest consumer of wastepaper and that's a good thing because in the last four years alone, China has prevented 65 million metric tons of wastepaper from heading to landfills in the US, Japan, and Europe," said Brian Stafford, the lead author of the report and an expert on the international pulp and paper industry. "Just last year, China's use of wastepaper instead of trees to make paper products probably saved 54 million metric tons of wood from being harvested for pulp."

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Recycling urine answer to phosphorus supply

Recycling urine may be the answer to a looming global shortage of phosphorus, an Australian researcher says.

Associate Professor Cynthia Mitchell, of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), says the world's deposits of phosphorus are due to run out in about 50 years.



And she says recycling the 500 litres of urine each person produces a year is the solution.

"Urine is the most concentrated source of phosphorus," she says. "At the moment we dilute that through our sewage system and send it out to the ocean.
"In the industrialised world we must start moving to a resource-recovery approach rather than the current waste-treatment approach."

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