So I have a bottle. A green bottle. The label says "Aspall Crisp Draught Suffolk Cyder". Most of that is true. Apart from the Draught part. Clearly it's a bottle. So, um, why use that word?
But that's not actually the most disconcerting thing about it. The rather confusing thing about it is that it's made of plastic. Yes, this rather nice high-end cider is being sold in a bottle, that at first inspection seems to be rather trog. You pick up a full bottle, and you have to keep checking that it's really 500ml, not 330ml, because it doesn't feel right for a half litre of booze.
But I can see why they're doing it. This bottle weighs 32g. A glass bottle (admittedly technically a beer bottle, as everything else went with the recycling yesterday morning) weighs 321g. So this bottle is a tenth of the weight, and reduces the container from 40% of the total shipped weight to 6%.
Hmm, I've been here before.
However you could buy good quality local beer or cider in a low-weight glass beer bottle that didn't travel so far! When you had consumed the contents you could take it back and then it would be reused, whereas the plastic has to go though complex processing to be turned into low-grade plastic products...
The calculations are very complex and a royal pain in the arse...!
