Clicking on to climate action

“Brands can be the tip of a spear that push it through a business.”

And consumers “really, really care”, Rowan told Tackling Climate Change webinar attendees in June, noting research indicating that 35% of consumers think environmental packaging is important, and 48% of them have changed brands to choose a more sustainable option. The survey showed 70% of people look for claims, labels and choices that that are environmentally friendly, and 67% will make a sustainable choice, even if it is more expensive.

In late 2020, Constellation Brands New Zealand launched Round Theory, a wine designed to have a lighter footprint, from production and packaging to shipping and carbon offsets. The wine comes in a squat bottle, with 30% less glass than is standard, giving it a lighter carbon footprint in production and transportation. And it wears a CarbonClick Climate Positive badge, indicating that the wine removes more CO2 from the atmosphere than it produces. “What we cannot reduce we are very happy to offset,” says Rowan of their work with CarbonClick, a New Zealand company, to measure the amount of carbon used at every stage of the lifecycle. “We have that number and then we double it. And that’s what we choose to offset.”

The carbon credits are purchased from projects in Australia and New Zealand, where the wines are sold, and also from some international projects, including a rainforest in Panama and a wind power project in India, designed to move the local economy off carbon-based fuel. Round Theory has a live tracker on its website that estimates the overall carbon offset, which at the time of the webinar was equivalent to 2 million glasses of wine, 2 million kg of carbon, and 105,624 years of tree growth over the past 24 months.

”Brands can absolutely have a role,” Rowan concluded. “This is one we built from scratch to be the most sustainable brand we can be.”