300

WOW, here it is people----POST No. 300------enjoy.

Here in California where we are overly in love with anything that smacks of a healthier life style, I read an interesting article in my Local newspaper, "The Daily News". The topic was titled, "Boxed vino can reduce wine's footprint". I am not a snob by any means---well maybe I am but I will deny it in public.---but hello, nobody that's anybody drinks Wine sold in boxes. At least that has been my understanding since back in College where I first developed my sense of sophistication. (Why is the LP sitting over there laughing himself sick at me??)
The article went on to explain that the vast bulk of American wine production is here on the West coast, whereas the bulk of the wind drinkers are East of the Mississippi. To meet the demand a lot of wine bottles are trucked to the east coast. The carbon-dioxide emissions created trucking the wine across country is calculated to be 5.2 POUNDS per 750 milliliter bottle. (That's a lot of soot people). Whereas if the Wine was packaged in boxes, (the newspaper story mentions 3 liter boxes in the study, that's an equivalent of (4 ) 750ml bottles) the carbon-dioxide emissions) would be about 2.6 pounds .
In summary if 97 percent of all the wine made to be consumed within a year, were shipped in those 3 liter boxes, it would eliminate about 2 MILLION TONS of greenhouse gas emissions per year, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars from the road.
I guess its a fact that the United States has now surpassed Italy in our total consumption of wine, and is closing in on France. (Talking total volume, not per person consumption, we are waaaay behind on that statistic). I neglected to mention that the article did make reference to the fact that Italy's Agriculture Ministry has recently announced that some wines that receive the government's quality assurance label may now be shipped in boxes.
It would seem that this trend to go to boxes is ultimately going to be the "green" thing to do, but I kinda have to ask myself----we already have with the problem of what to do with the zillions of plastic bags----has anyone thought about the tons of empty wine boxes we will have??