The Very Sexy Matter of PET Liners & Shrink Wrap

How the Napa Zero Waste Collective is dealing with... all the crappy bits

Somehow last year—I think it was thanks to Martin Reyes MW’s fabulous entanglings, in general, and our collaboration with the Snowden Cousins Merlot refillable bottle program—I got insinuated with the Napa Zero Waste Collective.

As a retailer and restaurateur, I’m an outlier in the Collective, because it’s basically a bunch of people who work at wineries that are trying to move the Napa Valley wine industry toward… you guessed it: zero waste. Not being a production person or speaking that language, I spend most of the meetings stealthily Googling under the table “what is PET liner” (only to find lots of dog beds for cars) or “gaylord” (Google turns up sundry hotels) to try and look like I totally know what all these winery logistics folks are talking about.

Three meetings in, I have learned that PET liners are the polyethylene terephthalate liners, or backing, of wine label stickers; when the labels go onto a bottle on the bottling line, the PET liners are basically the sticker backing that must then be disposed of. (Alert! Waste.) Gaylords are giant boxes—the kind that you see pumpkins stored in at the front of your grocery store in the fall. They’re used on pallets to ship large items in bulk. As you can start to see, we’re entering the very very sexy side of resilient practices in wine. It’s just as hot as planting fava beans between vine rows, or breeding miniature pigs to mow said cover crops! NOT. And this stuff definitely hasn’t been part of the “natural” wine conversation.

But before I lose you, I want to pause for a moment to consider the gravity of the Napa Zero Waste Collective (NZWC) mission—and the profound potential influence such an achievement could have on the global wine industry. If the Napa Valley could achieve zero waste, WHAT an inspiration that would be, WHAT a benchmark that could set for wine regions around the world.

My friends, we have a long ways to go, and this becomes all about the decidedly, completely unsexy world of logistics. As Filipa told me last week in regards to supply chain and materials logistics, “It’s the worst part.” This isn’t going to be the sexiest Substack of your week, but I hope you’ll stick with me as I outline here the current prioritized initiatives of the NZWC and the logistical challenges that go in tandem. While I’m not a winery poised to implement these practices, I hope I can spread the word to all of you readers who might be in a position at your own facility. MORE importantly, I hope I can spread the word to all you readers who are “just” drinkers, because you’re actually the most powerful people here: You have the buying power—the power to ask your favorite wineries, your favorite shop owners, your favorite sommeliers if any of the available wines are working to reduce their waste. Together, we can change the world! Ready? Lez do dis…

First up: Shrink wrap! Also known as stretch wrap, stretch film, or pallet wrap, this is the material with which wineries wrap pallets of cases of wine, so as to keep them together during transit. It takes a lot of stretch wrap to keep those cases from toppling. Shrink wrap is plastic—and this particular type of stretchy/wrappy plastic is not typically accepted in the “normal” recycling pile because it’s too easily contaminated by other waste materials and can jam machinery or become wrapped around sorting lines. That results in a LOT of inevitable waste at every winery. In order to get a “special collection” coordinated for a recycling company to pick up this junk, you have to have, like… 8 billion pounds of it stored for collection en masse (okay it’s not really 8 billion, but some very large number that even many wineries combined struggle to meet in a reasonable time frame).

To solve for this, the NZWC has teamed up with the Wine Service Cooperative, who is acting as a collection center for the shrink wrap. Once they’ve collected that 8 billion* pounds, the Co-op will call in a truck to collect it and bring it to a facility that repurposes the plastic into decking and outdoor furniture. And, guess what else, dear reader? YOU—even a non-winery person—can bring your (clean! not full of tomato sauce!) plastic wrap to the Wine Service Co-op, too! There’s a large 3-yard bin clearly marked at 60 Harlow Court in Napa or 1150 Dowdell Lane in St. Helena for stretch wrap that you can just toss your clean, stretchy/wrappy bits right on into. Logistically, the challenges are that the Wine Service Co-op is trying to ascertain when they’ll reach that critical mass to schedule the pickup, and so wineries are encouraged to, if at all possible, report how much they’ve got coming and when. The full flier with details is below! Please: Your call to action, if you work in wine production, is to share this with your team and bring your stretch wrap to the Co-op!

The second priority right now for the Napa Zero Waste Collective is collecting and recycling those aforementioned PET liners, or wine label sticker backings. To me, this is where the logistics part really got wild. First, in order to recycle the liners, after the labels are all spun off their little spools and onto the bottles, the liners have to be “re-spun” back into a tidy circle, essentially operating the machinery in reverse. But they’re slippery devils, as Cesar Pulido of Bronco Wine Company, who has implemented this program at Bronco, was quick to warn, and it’s best to cut the webbing half-way through to prevent the spun circle from quickly “funneling” (unravelling or slipping out from the middle, to your dismay). You need to collect them in a tidy, spun-up bundle—without any leftover label bits, contaminating tape or string holding them together—that can be tossed into a gaylord (the giant box, not the hotel) for ultimate collection by RafCycle by Raflatac.

Also, fun: Each gaylord should weigh 1500-2000 pounds, and a minimum of 40,000 pounds—UM, that’s 20 gaylords!—are required for pickup. (These are true, correct numbers, according to the Raflatac brochures, not my made-up “8 billion”). Bronco is the fourth largest producer of wine in the United States, so while we must give HUGE props to Cesar and his team for such powerful resiliency initiatives on this front, we must also acknowledge that small, medium, and even large-sized wineries will have a helluva time achieving 40,000 pounds of gaylords full of label liners.

It was eye-opening (and, admittedly, a bit inane and damning) to spend a full hour of time talking in the NZWC meeting about the logistics of getting wineries to teach their teams how to re-spool liners (don’t forget to cut half-way through!), how to keep them from slipping out and unraveling all over the cellar, how to tidily pack the slippery devils into boxes or buckets that can be marked and set aside until drop-off at a set, as-yet-undetermined location that has 20 random gaylords just lying around—and the dry, indoor space for said gaylords!

“Oof da,” as we would respond back in my native Minnesota.

NZWC is working on a “how to” video to share with wineries, and they’re still trying to sort out the collection location. In the meantime, if you’re a Bay Area or North-Bay based producer reading this and are about to begin bottling and have the ability to store even a small box (like a wine case) or four of your own neatly spooled liners at your facility for a couple of months (they’re targeting a late spring or early summer pick-up), PLEASE DO. Then, email nvzerowaste@gmail.com with questions on how to re-spin/spool and collect, as well as to let them know you’re collecting. The NZWC team will then let you know where and when to drop off your boxes of liners for the giant milk run collection.

RafCycle Collection Program Instructions; click each image above to view in full

There’s also, in true, beloved grassroots initiative fashion, a NZWC Google sheet, which lists the wineries that have been “notified” about these programs. As a member of the Collective, I’m supposed to fill in whom I’ve reached out to… so! If you’re in production, and you’re reading this, you’ve been told! Drop me a note in the comments with your winery’s name or the winery you’re communicating this info to—forward them this Substack!!—and I’ll make sure you get very sexy updates on all these very unsexy zero-waste bits. Maybe we can have a party when we hit 40,000 pounds…