While boxed wine may remind some drinkers of cheap juice and college parties, startup wine brand Juliet is highlighting a different attribute of the bag-in-box package: its carbon footprint.

Juliet is also aiming to revamp the reputation of boxed wine and lure high-end, sustainably-minded drinkers to the category. It’s part of a larger push within the alcohol industry to find more sustainable ways of packaging, which often means cutting out heavier, hard-to-recycle materials.

“We really want to shift the culture of wine drinking away from glass bottles,” Allison Luvera, co-founder of Juliet Wine, told Adweek. After digging into the data on glass versus bag-in-box packaging, the boxed format “became a real pillar of the company,” she said.

Compared to the traditional glass wine bottle, the bag-in-box format generates 40% fewer carbon emissions on average when taking package production and product distribution into account. That’s largely due to the weight of the glass bottles, which makes them heavier and more carbon-intensive to ship, according to a 2010 study by the Glass Packaging Institute. Juliet’s currently working on an updated lifecycle assessment for its own package which will be completed this year.

The problem with glass

Technically speaking, glass is an infinitely recyclable material. But in the U.S., only about 31% of glass generated actually gets recycled. That’s significantly lower than Europe’s 74% glass recycling rate.

Due in part to the contamination and breakage that happens in single-stream systems, much of the “recycled” glass in the U.S. isn’t actually made into new bottles—instead, it’s crushed up and used in place of gravel as a road base or daily cover for landfills.

For wine, Juliet’s founders acknowledge that glass is still the best option for the small percentage of wines that are meant to be aged on the shelf for years. But the majority of wine consumed is everyday wine, paired with weeknight meals, a weekend get-together or a celebratory event.

Switching to boxed wine “is significantly lowering the environmental impact of the wine that you drink,” Luvera said. “The reason it hasn’t been adopted by the masses in the U.S. is really just this negative stigma. Box wine is perceived as cheap, it’s perceived as low quality.”

The quest for a plastic-free paper bottle

Juliet isn’t the only alcohol brand looking to curb emissions by swapping glass for paper. Diageo-owned whisky brand Johnnie Walker is also working on a paper-based bottle, which it announced in 2020.