Excuse me my good man this wine is errr.....bagged.

One of the areas of environmental concern that is thankfully gaining increased attention is the carbon footprint of food production and distribution. Many producers are now starting to reduce packaging in their products while retailers are starting to make more local produce available (there is still a very long way to go but it is a start). Now changes are coming to that most traditional and civilised of packages, the wine bottle.

Australian producer Wolf Blass have started to use PET plastic bottles while Banrock Station are using my least favourite packaging the infamous Tetra Pak. However the prize for ingenious packaging must go to Arniston Bay with their resealable bag. They claim the bag uses 80% less of a carbon footprint than glass bottle. It also uses 90% volume in landfill (for those too damn lazy to recycle) and can be taken to public events where glass is not allowed. All this may be true, it may also be a good thing but it does not bode well for the traditional images of the snooty wine waiter, the dust covered bottle in a musty wine cellar, the scrunch of a champagne bottle in a silver ice bucket or the homeless person reduced to drinking blue nun or black tower from a bottle inside a brown paper bag. Oh well here is a picture: -

new battery tech

Silicon nanowires have been used in a lithium battery to increase the capacity by a factor of ten - should lay waste to the 'milik float' arguement against electric cars.