Alcohol Brands Are Ditching Glass for Paper to Cut Emissions

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While boxed wine may remind some drinkers of cheap juice and college parties, startup wine brand Juliet is highlighting a different attribute of the bag-in-box package: its carbon footprint.

Juliet is also aiming to revamp the reputation of boxed wine and lure high-end, sustainably-minded drinkers to the category. It's part of a larger push within the alcohol industry to find more sustainable ways of packaging, which often means cutting out heavier, hard-to-recycle materials.

"We really want to shift the culture of wine drinking away from glass bottles," Allison Luvera, co-founder of Juliet Wine, told Adweek. After digging into the data on glass versus bag-in-box packaging, the boxed format "became a real pillar of the company," she said.

Compared to the traditional glass wine bottle, the bag-in-box format generates 40% fewer carbon emissions on average when taking package production and product distribution into account. That's largely due to the weight of the glass bottles, which makes them heavier and more carbon-intensive to ship, according to a 2010 study by the Glass Packaging Institute. Juliet's currently working on an updated lifecycle assessment for its own package which will be completed this year.

Technically speaking, glass is an infinitely recyclable material. But in the U.S., only about 31% of glass generated actually gets recycled. That's significantly lower than Europe's 74% glass recycling rate.

Due in part to the contamination and breakage that happens in single-stream systems, much of the "recycled" glass in the U.S. isn't actually made into new bottles—instead, it's crushed up and used in place of gravel as a road base or daily cover for landfills.

For wine, Juliet's founders acknowledge that glass is still the best option for the small percentage of wines that are meant to be aged on the shelf for years. But the majority of wine consumed is everyday wine, paired with weeknight meals, a weekend get-together or a celebratory event.

Switching to boxed wine "is significantly lowering the environmental impact of the wine that you drink," Luvera said. "The reason it hasn't been adopted by the masses in the U.S. is really just this negative stigma. Box wine is perceived as cheap, it's perceived as low quality."

Juliet isn't the only alcohol brand looking to curb emissions by swapping glass for paper. Diageo-owned whisky brand Johnnie Walker is also working on a paper-based bottle, which it announced in 2020.

Still, it seems the concept has proven more difficult than expected. While Johnnie Walker initially expected to have a market-ready, plastic-free, paper-based bottle in 2021, the brand has yet to find a formula that suits its needs. The brand wouldn't share an updated timeline for the bottle's release, saying instead that testing will continue throughout 2023.

Johnnie Walker Whisky Will Come in Paper Bottles Next Year

"Since we announced the paper bottle, we’ve carried out several rounds of technical testing as well as consumer research with Pulpex. We’ve been prototyping, exploring different formats and closures, and performing sensory and shelf life testing," Dave Lütkenhaus, global sustainability breakthrough innovation director at Diageo, told Adweek via email. "We refuse to compromise on product and pack performance, so we’re working through the challenges we keep facing."

Without a plastic liner like is used in a traditional boxed wine or in Juliet's trademarked Eco-Magnum design, it's difficult to create a container that's stable enough to make it through distribution lines and then sit, often for months, on a store shelf. On the flip side, every added material makes recycling or composting the paper package more complicated.

"To make it to completely liquid proof, you have to treat the paper in such a way that it complicates the overall [sustainability] message," Dan Malenke, paperboard packaging expert and consultant for the Paper and Packaging Board, told Adweek. "We’re using a lot of plastics, foils, laminates, films, UV decorative treatments to the box […] it's still recyclable, but it's more complicated. It's more time consuming, it's more intensive a process."

It's for many of these reasons that Juliet has opted to use a plastic bag inside the cylindrical box. Still, flexible plastic isn't generally recyclable in curbside recycling systems. Cognizant of that reality, Juliet includes a prepaid return label in each online order to let drinkers send the plastic bag back for recycling, which Juliet then sends along to its recycling partner, Terracycle. Later this year, it’ll be launching a refill option letting shoppers order a new bag of wine without replacing the paper box.

"The material science still isn't where we want it to be," Lauren De Niro Pipher, co-founder and co-CEO of Juliet, told Adweek. "I think we chose the least of all evils."

Kathryn Lundstrom is Adweek's sustainability editor.