Wine Tasting Like Paper or the Bottle?

[Roy Hersh]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ ... sfeed=true

[Eric Menchen]

O.k., I get that glass has mass which is a transport issue, but it is recyclable, so not a landfill issue. "... the world's first paper milk bottle ..." Ummm, we call them cartons, and they've been around as long as I can remember. They are made of paper(board) and where I live, they are recycled. But I get my milk in bottles, delivered by the dairy, which takes back the empties and reuses them. And that is reuse, not recycle, so a better carbon footprint. "The wine bottles feature a similar bag to that found in wine boxes so the drink is kept in pristine condition." Is that biodegradable like the bottle? Do you have to separate the two?

[Peter W. Meek]

Where I live, paper milk cartons are NOT recycled, and cannot be since they are plastic coated. This coating makes both the paper AND the plastic un-recyclable. When they get put in the recycling stream they actually make recycling harder and more expensive, by requiring hand sorting to remove them and/or by making the recyclable paper less valuable when they are missed and included with the paper. Clean paper is fairly valuable, especially office (rag) paper. Paper mixed with paper that has unseparable plastic or wax coatings is just about valueless, and does not biodegrade very well either.

If the plastic bag in these wine bottles is easily removable, then they should be able to be recycled (A thought for milk carton manufacturers?) into the separate paper and plastic recycling streams.

[Andy Velebil]

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the recycling business is all about metal being shipped to China at the moment. Paper has fallen off the radar. How do I know this? Well today I spoke to one of the heads of one of the largest recycling companies in California. An interesting, and very educational, conversation to say the least.

[Moses Botbol]

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the recycling business is all about metal being shipped to China at the moment.

Just like our fresh water from the Great Lakes is being shipped off to China.

[Peter W. Meek]

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the recycling business is all about metal being shipped to China at the moment.

Just like our fresh water from the Great Lakes is being shipped off to China.

They keep trying this, but so far we are protecting Great Lakes water. So far as I know, there is almost no Great Lakes water (entire watershed, not just lake water) being diverted outside the basin. A small amount is being diverted from the South end of Lake Michigan, but that is more than made up for by a slightly larger diversion from the Hudson's Bay region into the Northern end of Lake Superior. A certain number of bottles of spring water get shipped out of the basin, but no pipelines or bulk water carriers currently (as far as I know) leave the basin.

http://www.epa.gov/greatlakes/atlas/ (the Great Lakes Atlas; great source for GL info)
http://www.epa.gov/greatlakes/atlas/images/big04.gif (very cool graphic of how - and where - the water moves)

[Moses Botbol]

\They keep trying this, but so far we are protecting Great Lakes water. So far as I know, there is almost no Great Lakes water (entire watershed, not just lake water) being diverted outside the basin.

I've heard & seen on TV that tankers are "sucking up" the water and then cruise to China. Pumping directly from Great Lakes is illegal, but not pumping from sources that supply the Great Lakes as Nestle is doing.

[Peter W. Meek]

\They keep trying this, but so far we are protecting Great Lakes water. So far as I know, there is almost no Great Lakes water (entire watershed, not just lake water) being diverted outside the basin.

I've heard & seen on TV that tankers are "sucking up" the water and then cruise to China. Pumping directly from Great Lakes is illegal, but not pumping from sources that supply the Great Lakes as Nestle is doing.

Ahh. They are getting back "in ballast". Ships need to be loaded to at least a significant part of their normal load to operate safely. If it has no cargo, a tanker will need to draw some water into its tanks to be stable. I wish them well, as ballast water is how most of the aquatic invasive species have reached the Great Lakes.

They are supposed to drain and flush their ballast tanks at sea before entering the St Lawrence Seaway (including the Great Lakes, where the salt water will kill any fresh-water species (salt-water species will be killed if discharged in fresh water) and refill with salt water, but many fail to do so. I presume they are required to drain and flush before entering fresh-water estuaries in China, but if they don't do it here, I bet they don't do it there.

Ship ballast water is allowed, I believe. It doesn't amount to much, in the whole scheme of things. All you have to do is look at one of those "salties" (as they are called on the Great Lakes) out on the lake to realize that they cannot be taking much water from the lakes. A 12" pipeline couldn't take all that much either, but it is the principle of the thing. Once the first pipeline is permitted, an aquaduct is next, followed by a river.

Nestle had to do some pretty fancy legal work before they were allowed to draw "spring" water in Michigan, including demonstrating that most would be sold within the watershed where it gets returned (via water-treatment plants) to the GL basin.

A city in Wisconsin that lies partly within and partly outside the watershed was refused permission to draw water from the lakes, as their waste-water treatment plants discharged outside the basin.

If you check big04.gif (link above), you will see that in an average year, 251 thousand cubic feet of water per second leaves the Great Lakes via the St Lawrence river. Again, it is to protect this sort of water flow, which is needed to protect the unique ecology of the Great Lakes, that requires the strong legal defense of the lakes.
Sorry, I seem to have hi-jacked this thread. Back to paper bottles.