Wednesday, January 2 2008
New Year's Resolutions
Mmm, carbon
I'm not normally one for making resolutions at the turn of the new year. Typically I'll pledge to drink more, take up smoking, or acquire some other socially unacceptable habit--keeping the bar low helps encourage success, after all.
I couldn't resist one this year, however. After reading a New York Time op-ed piece by Jared Diamond on Resource Consumption, I had to stop and think about my own energy use and carbon output. Diamond is variously described as a physiologist, evolutionary biologist and a professor of geography. I know him as a fascinating writer, having picked up Guns, Germs and Steel in the late 90's and been fascinated with his thesis on how the patterns of history were formed by the agriculture, technology, animal husbandry and biological load (germs) of different cultures. You can argue that he misses a few tricks (he seems a bit blind to the influence of religion on societal clashes, preferring biological imperatives) but he makes some wonderful points.
The next book I read from him was Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. A bit of a mind-blower, it explained the factors that can contribute to the collapse of a formerly successful society: climate change, relations with neighbors, trade, environmental issues, and a society's response to those issues. Far from loading the blame on evolved systems like agricultural practises or hapless fellow-travelers like germs, this book sees human action (or inaction) on environmental issues as the proximal and ultimate cause of 'failure', like Easter Island natives squandering all of their resources to build big heads, instead of sustainably managing their forests and resources.
I was digging around a bit today, and ran across NYT op-ed piece by Tyler Colman, of drvino.com, on wine and carbon footprints. I'm aware that many of the things we do in North America affect the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere, and that carbon levels are influencing climate change, but I had never considered wine in the equation. After all, vines are green plants, and they make oxygen, right? Yes, but according to Colman:
A Napa Valley wine can emit 2.6 pounds of carbon dioxide on its journey from growing the grapes, making the wine and transport to San Francisco. But the same bottle making the truck trip to Connecticut would emit 5.7 pounds of carbon dioxide in total. Ship it by air and its footprint would quadruple because it takes so much fuel to keep a plane aloft.
Why? Because of glass. A 40-pound case of wine probably has more than 20 pounds of glass in it. Alternative packaging products like Tetra Pak or bag-in-box have less carbon intensity because they are lighter and can be packed more efficiently in a shipping container. The lighter alternative packaging means that the carbon used for transporting wine is used for just that – wine, not glass. (Glass adds mass; the greater the mass, the less efficient the transport is.)
Yoiks! Are my wine drinking habits are environmentally unsound? Well, perhaps not as much as they could be. I drink wine from all over the world, but a lot of it reaches me by boat or railcar, both relatively efficient methods of transport.
The amount of greenhouse gases associated with transport also, surprisingly, means that drinking wine from overseas may be more environmentally sound than buying from American vineyards. Holding the growing method, winery practices and bottle size constant, it is more carbon-efficient for people in Connecticut to drink a bottle of wine from Bordeaux than from Sonoma. The short truck route on both ends of the efficient miles of container shipping means the French wine has 50 percent less carbon dioxide emissions, about three pounds.
Well, I feel a little better. But more than that, I actually feel pretty great. Because making your own wine from kits circumvents the carbon cycle to a degree: grapes for wine kits are processed into juices and concentrates right in the vineyards where they're grown, and shipped very efficiently in in bulk to our facility in Canada (usually by container on a ship, or in a tanker from California). We balance and blend the raws into kits, and distribute them in sizes from 7.5 litres (2 US-Gallons) to 16 litres (4.2 US-Gallons), which are designed to make 23 litres (6 US-Gallons) or about two-and-a-half cases. The kits are then shipped (very efficiently--kit boxes stack well in containers and bag-in-box weighs little compared to glass) to distribution centres and sold through retailers. Consumers take them home and ferment and bottle them (kit wine yeast does produce CO2 during fermentation, but it's a wash since commercial wine does too).
Bottling can make a big difference. Some people buy new bottles, but a lot of folks start off by recycling commercial wine bottles, removing them from the waste stream, which is good, since glass is almost never actually recycled, but rather crushed and buried in landfills. Also, glass takes a lot of energy to make, so every re-use means less energy use. Then, home winemakers clean and re-use their bottles multiple times, saving more energy and keeping the waste-stream uncrowded.
While it's not perfect (little about our modern life really is) it's a pretty good way of reducing your carbon footprint and still enjoying the benefits of a wine consuming lifestyle.
And my resolution? Why, to drink more of my own wine, of course--everyone has to do their part!
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