It's the packaging, stupid--or is it?

by Jay Arthur

With the festive season fast approaching and the likelihood that I will be further increasing my already substantial investment in the province's liquor stores, this shareholder has a question. What on earth is going on?
I'm not talking about the fancy new gin palaces they are building to sell me booze, although it's tempting. I suppose when you are bringing in a cool billion in profit each year, you are inclined to swagger a bit and put on graces. A little arrogance is to be expected.
And it just goes to prove that sales is not just about what is inside the packaging; it is also very much about the packaging itself.
So all this talk about replacing glass bottles with other packaging like aseptic cartons is very intriguing.
But first, since when did glass become such a pariah?  For hundreds of years, the glass bottle has been happily holding our wine and liquor (and our beer). It gets no respect in the blue box however. In most cases, it gets used once to make a bottle and the less than two-thirds of those bottles that come back are crushed and landfilled into roadbeds. And they call it recycling.
Against that prospect, aseptic cartons look pretty good. Clearly a lot cheaper to transport, paper, plastic and aluminum are used to make the container and some of the paper is recovered in the blue box (although very little right now) and made into paper towels. 
But if those glass bottles could be either reused or recycled into new bottles, the environmental equation changes dramatically.
One of the things that the extreme green folks have pushed for years is the idea of standardized packaging. They say it would cost a lot less and the opportunities for substantial waste reduction at source and reuse would be vastly increased. And they're right.
"Impossible!" cry the producers, whose marketing department staff need deep breathing exercises every time the idea is broached. (The environmental staff are not allowed in those meetings. They only get to attend when they need to justify a marketing decision.)
Every time the notion of washing and reusing wine bottles has been suggested, it has been immediately shot down as

impractical. Wineries wouldn't want their product in the same bottles, we are told. Who is going to pay a high price for a bottle of wine if it looks like every other product on the shelf? It's just not going to happen.
You would have thought that someone would have quietly pointed out there are labels on wine bottles. These are designed to differentiate one product from another, with things like brand names, descriptions of the contents and other little niceties like "appellation controlle". One can only assume that the marketing guys who could explain all this are still out of the room hyperventilating when these questions arise.
Of course there is always the possibility that because this idea is usually brought up in conjunction with calls for a deposit-return system at the LCBO, the decision makers still have their hands over their ears and miss this important information.
The fact that the makers of beer have been using the same bottles for years seems to have escaped every-one's notice. Then again, mention the brewers in an LCBO boardroom and those hands go right back to the ears.
So if the packaging for wine is so important that we can't use the same  bottle design for wine, how come it's suddenly okay to use aseptic cartons? 
You may well ask.
It seems the sales of the French wine in the new screw-top, composite packages are going through the roof, even if they do look as if they belong in the fridge next to the milk.
So this is good news, because it clearly demonstrates to the LCBO bigwigs that consumers can and will read labels. Otherwise they would be wondering why the liquor store was selling orange juice and why it was so darned expensive.
That means we could standardize wine bottles, even for French wine, and people would buy it. And if there were some way to get those empty bottles back intact, maybe they could be washed and refilled--just like we do with beer. Even if not reused in this way, they would be a lot easier to recycle and hence a lot more valuable.
Obviously we won't be shipping empty bottles back to France, but we have a lot of wineries right here in Ontario that could used those empties.
I fully realize that at this point the LCBO bigwigs are now screaming out loud in addition to covering their ears, just to be sure they don't hear this. 
So we need to find away of getting this message on to an aseptic carton wine label.
We know they'll read that.