Paper Bottles?

Guinlilly · Nov 23, 2011

http://gizmodo.com/5861146/will-wine-snobs-embrace-a-paper-bottle

Interesting article about bottles made of paper. The inside is actually lined with the material wine bags are made of.

Chevette Girl · Nov 23, 2011

That's neat. I wonder how the corking works?

wildoates · Nov 23, 2011

Screw tops?

skunkboy · Nov 23, 2011

Gonna have to plastic coat them or something, else I see the bottles having issues with moisture and decomposing...

Guinlilly · Nov 23, 2011

skunkboy said:
Gonna have to plastic coat them or something, else I see the bottles having issues with moisture and decomposing...

They are lined with the same bladder that gets used for wine in a box.

Soyala_Amaya · Nov 23, 2011

I know the article says it has '10% of the carbon footprint" but what about the renewability of the process. I just know that paper is made from trees and glass is made from silica, one of the most common elements on the planet.

Chevette Girl · Nov 23, 2011

It takes a LOT of energy to make glass out of silica, and you can use other things than trees to make paper. Like hemp

or recycled paper...

AToE · Nov 24, 2011

One of the other major issues with glass is weight - to transport the same volume of liquid in glass vs plastic vs "tetrapack" or whatever costs/consumes more.

Comparing things becomes extremely complicated. One thing to remember too is that a great deal of pulp that becomes paper was never good wood, it's the sawdust and excess from cutting good wood into planks (which is why with paper "recycled" is a meaning less term, it's almost all recycled, what you want is "post consumer recycled").

Hemp and bamboo are the answers to a lot of the consumption problems we have, hemp unfortunately had a run in with cotton a long while back and cotton won in the courtrooms/politics.

Soyala_Amaya · Nov 24, 2011

Ok, that guy tells me he's making the bottles out of 'post consumer recycled paper', bamboo, or hemp, or something else like that, I'm cool. But I"ve driven through towns in Kansas that had paper mills glose down 60 years ago when my dad was a kid and the entire town STILL stinks of pollution, chemical, and rot. Maybe paper's come a long way, maybe I just haven't done the research because of stories from my dad about how essential the paper mill was to their local economy, but how any kid that actually lived near their was constantly made fun of for stench.

It's most likely a background issue for me and I need to do more research...but I still can't see paper being that great of a recyclable when it's created from non renewable resources.

Chevette Girl · Nov 24, 2011

They actually run a fermentation on paper pulp that releases a lot of sulphur when it loosens up the fibres (maybe they need better nutrients!), that's what most of the stink is. And you'd think wood chips would compost well but my husband's family has a cottage around the corner from where a wood mill used to be and the sawdust pile's as big as a house and has been there for decades too.

AToE, at Thanksgiving this year I collected the wine bottles and two or three of them advertised that they were lightweight bottles, something like 15% less glass to save on shipping and production.

Duracell · Nov 24, 2011

The real question is will it be reusable for the home brewer? I consider reusing my wine bottles for mead as recycling in an eco friendly way. They don't end up in a landfill so I'm not adding to the "problem".

Now, if these bottles catch on we have to look 10+ years in the future when real glass bottles would become quite rare, wouldn't you think? Then buying a case of reusable glass bottles would make you look like a non-eco friendly person because you're not using recyclable bottles!

Maybe we'll all be homebrewing into plastic water bottles by then anyway, who knows!?!

wildoates · Nov 24, 2011

Recycling paper is not at all good for the environment, which is why I don't recycle it. There are items that are worth recycling, but paper's not one of them.

AToE · Nov 24, 2011

I've had some questions about that myself, but I have yet to find any hard data that really proves to me one way or the other whether recycling paper does more or less damage than just tossing it and using new paper... I err on the side of recycling it until I find the data though because so far I see more experts saying it's good than that it's bad... just not at the point where I personally understand everything involved well enough yet. Need to do more digging.

At the end of the day recycling is largely bandaid anyways, reducing consumption in the first place is far more effective (instead of buying bottles of water all the time, buy a few and keep refilling them being one obvious example).

Or as said above, keep reusing bottles for homebrew, great example of simply reducing consumption in the first place (as is homebrew itself actually, far less shipping pollution involved per drink, FAR less).

Chevette Girl · Nov 24, 2011

AToE said:
Or as said above, keep reusing bottles for homebrew, great example of simply reducing consumption in the first place (as is homebrew itself actually, far less shipping pollution involved per drink, FAR less).

I was going to point out that in comparing reusing versus recycling, reusing is best in our case but not so feasible for a large-scale producer, I don't believe they're permitted to reuse wine bottles, are they?

There are a lot of factors to weigh, we did a study one time in university on which used more energy and resources, cloth or disposable diapers, and they came out about the same... just differently applied.

Guinlilly · Nov 24, 2011

Chevette Girl said:
I was going to point out that in comparing reusing versus recycling, reusing is best in our case but not so feasible for a large-scale producer, I don't believe they're permitted to reuse wine bottles, are they?

There are a lot of factors to weigh, we did a study one time in university on which used more energy and resources, cloth or disposable diapers, and they came out about the same... just differently applied.

No they can not reuse bottles and if there is a problem with any wine/beer that has been bottled or if it is a shortfill, it gets poured out and the bottles broken and thrown away. We get a LOT of champagne style bottles this way from DFH. As homebrewers, I honestly think glass is the better way to go, but for a pro a bottle like this may cut cost.

Also, glass bottles aren't as easy to come by as some might think. DFH had run into a shortage of bottles because there was a shortage of the right type of silica - not all silica is created equal.

wildoates · Nov 24, 2011

I'd think that if ANY brewery would come up with a crazy-fun bottling alternative it'd be DFH.

AToE · Nov 24, 2011

I have no idea about wine bottles in Canada, and I know in the US glass bottles aren't reused, they're melted down and remade.

But in Canada beer bottles are just straight up refilled. You can tell when you've got a really old one in your hand because it looks like it's been lightly sandblasted around the top and bottom of the widest part... this method is so far superior to melting and remaking that it frankly blows my mind that it isn't the standard everywhere. ???

wildoates · Nov 25, 2011

Back in the ancient times (when Wayne, Dan, and I were younglings) most bottles were collected, washed, and reused. Pity they still aren't. They reuse glass soda bottles in Norway, and beer too, I think.

AToE · Nov 25, 2011

wildoates said:
Back in the ancient times (when Wayne, Dan, and I were younglings) most bottles were collected, washed, and reused. Pity they still aren't. They reuse glass soda bottles in Norway, and beer too, I think.

What happened to make it stop? I just can't fathom why they'd melt the intact ones!

Chevette Girl · Nov 25, 2011

I bet certain agencies have declared the practice unsanitary... all it would take is a lawsuit or two...

and I haven't seen an "old" beer bottle in years (although I don't drink that much bottled beer so this may not be a valid data point)

Paper Bottles?

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