PET/RPET vs. verre dans l'industrie des emballages à usage unique : application au cycle de vie complet dans le secteur vinicole du sud de la France et focus sur les effets en fin de vie.

International audienceThe growing French wine industry export trade leads packaging manufacturers and wine producers to develop innovative solutions to lower the transportation and bottle production related impacts. The traditional wine containing system is a 75cL glass bottle closed by a cork stopper. In recent years, a new lightweight glass bottle emerged, getting the bottle weight from around 500g to 365g, as a first solution to reduce the environmental footprint of transportation. However, according to recent Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies in the field, this is still not enough compared to other systems, not to mention the remaining risk of breakage which triggers a pressure on the impact intensive wine production. Furthermore these studies focus on packages such as Tetra Pack®, Bag in Box®, or standing pouches, not compatible with the higher range wine studied here. Weighing around 50g and almost unbreakable, a 75cL PolyEthylene Terephtalate (PET) bottle is an interesting alternative to the energy consuming glass bottle production. This plastic is highly recyclable, meaning that a used PET bottle can be incorporated in the manufacturing process of a new bottle. The Novinpak® project aims at developing such a lightweight recycled PET (RPET) containing packaging for quality wine. Among the different existing beverage plastic packaging LCAs, none is considering the true vine growing and wine production processes of the region it is embedded in. The present work aims at comparing glass and PET/RPET wine bottles. It also takes into account the upstream processes of local wine production, the packaging manufacturing and filling, the distribution step and the end of life as well. By doing so, the contribution of the packaging manufacturing process can be put into perspective among the entire wine bottle production process. The end-of-life hypotheses play a big role in such a study results and therefore require much attention