Quinn Glass launches worlds first 300g wine bottle

The bottle, which was launched on Wednesday (September 23), is set to be used in Tesco supermarkets and Cheshire-based Quinn Glass said that it marked a “significant step” in the lightweighting of glass packaging.

The wine bottle represents a 56g reduction on the previous lightest wine bottle and comes as part of the glass manufacturer's work with retailers Tesco, drinks company Kingsland Wine & Spirits and the Waste & Resources Action Programme under the GlassRite initiative, which encourages lightweight design.

Peter Fitzgerald, sales and marketing manager at Quinn, told letsrecycle.com that the company had been continually working on lightweighting bottles since 2005 and, he said: “We have come a long way and we can continue making further and further lightweighting.”

Mr Fitzgerald explained that the 300g screwcap bottle, which had been subject to a series of trials since May this year, comes after continued work to find the optimum weight for wine bottles being produced at the company's glass production and filling plant at Elton in Cheshire.

‘Not'

In addition to its work on lightweighting, Quinn also explained that it has developed a new glass colour called ‘not', which is a mixture of both clear and green glass and is currently being in the production of ‘entry-level' wine bottles.

The company claim that it developed the ‘not' colour as a means of saving waste and improving energy efficiency when changing the colour of recovered glass in a furnace.

For example, when the company would change from clear to green, the glass produced in the crossover period would be deemed wasted (as it was neither clear nor green) and be put back through the system to be used in the production of green glass. However, with ‘not', the intermediate material is now fed through into the production line and used for wine bottles for Kingsland Wine and other producers.

The announcement of the ‘not' colour comes a fortnight after a study carried out by WRAP found that consumers were “just as likely” to buy products regardless of the colour of the packaging (see letsrecycle.com story).

Dispute

Quinn is currently awaiting the outcome of a decision by Secretary of State for communities and local government John Denham on whether to approve the decision by Cheshire West and Chester to grant retrospective planning permission for Quinn's £250 million Elton glass bottle production plant (see letsrecycle.com story).

However, in conjunction with an enforcement notice issued by Cheshire West and Chester in April, there remains the possibility for Quinn to have cease production and remove any unauthorised buildings on the site.

Commenting ahead of the decision, Mr Fitzgerald said the company was confident that it would receive approval from Mr Denham.

He said: “All we can say is that the Secretary of State made five recommendations to look at and we have met those and the council has scrutinised it for 18 months. Therefore there is no reason why it shouldn't be approved.”

Quinn said that it expects to hear the result of Mr Denham's decision “in early October” and that there was still the potential for the planning approval for the plant to be subject to a public inquiry.