The champagne industry has designed new packaging to help give them a smaller carbon footprint. Traditional champagne bottles will get slimmer shoulders to make them weigh slightly less. The small difference should yield the same pollution savings as pulling 4,000 cars off of the road.
The original bottle weighs 900g and the new version will be slimmed down by 65g. They really can't reduce it much more than that because of the huge amount of pressure in the bottle-3x the air pressure found in a car tire. The bottles also have to fit with existing machinery at the wineries.
Where are they made? From the NYT:
"Most of the new Champagne bottles are made at the St. Gobain plant near here, where molten red glass is dropped from a 20-foot-high chute into molds at a rate of 160 a minute. The glass is cooled from more than 1,000 degrees Celsius for over an hour, scanned for imperfections and stacked on pallets for shipping.
If they were truly green, they'd just box that sparkly juice up. But then popping a box isn't as fun as popping a bottle." [NY Times]
