Siobhan McCloskey

October 24, 2006

Milazzo, a small award-winning Sicilian winery, is trying to go green. Two years ago, Saverio Lo Leggio, the winery's owner, agreed to allow researchers from the University of Palermo to measure the cost to the world environment of making one bottle of red wine.

Researchers discovered that the winemaking at the Milazzo winery was wasteful and needlessly polluting. One bottle of wine created more than one pound of waste and emitted 16 grams of sulfur dioxide into the air. On a larger scale, producing the 100,000 bottles that made up the 2004 vintage generated 22,000 pounds of plastic waste, 11,000 pounds of paper, and a lot of waste water. Small businesses, like Milazzo, generate sixty percent of the world's commercial waste and cause more than fifty percent of environmental damage, according to the European Environment Agency, which is part of the European Union. Researchers wanted to study wineries like Milazzo, which is one of hundreds of small wineries and a thousand small businesses in Sicily, to determine the environmental cost of smaller companies using more environmentally friendly practices. Already, Milazzo has made its production process greener. They now print their bottles' labels, recycle plastic that used to be thrown out, reuse irrigation water, and have given up using pesticides.

The researchers hope that creating a database of models and products will make it easier to evaluate and improve the environmental performance of small companies. Companies would benefit by being ahead of environmental regulations and being able to announce to consumers that they are environmentally friendly. Both of these advantages add up to increased profits for companies and a greener environment for all of us.

For more information and from which this summary is directly written, please see:

Elisabeth Rosenthal, A Bold Little Wine That's Less Polluting, N.Y. Times, Oct. 17, 2006, at C3, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/business/worldbusiness/17wine.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.