What's the lowest carbon alcohol?
Are beer, wine or spirits better for the climate? And how does alcohol overall compare to other drinks and foods? Jocelyn Timperley takes a look into her drinking habits to find the most environmentally friendly tipple.
A few years ago, I discovered that the glass in some wine bottles can weigh as much as the wine inside, effectively doubling the transport emissions of the wine.
I decided to try a switch to boxed wine and, living in France at the time, found some decent ones. But I also found that a constantly open box in the fridge made me drink more, and after moving back to the UK where good boxed wine seemed harder to come by, I dropped the experiment.
While I've taken steps to reduce my personal carbon footprint from things like food and transport, the environmental footprint of alcohol consumption has largely remained off my radar. In fact, alcohol often seems to be given rather a silent free pass when it comes to discussions on sustainable food choices. So I decided to investigate in more detail how much alcohol is actually contributing to my carbon emissions – and whether I can enjoy it in a more sustainable way.
My first port of call was Megan Cook, a research fellow at the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research (CAPR) at La Trobe University in Australia, who recently co-published a call for more research on the contribution of alcohol to climate change and other environmental problems.
Cook says the evidence around the environmental impacts of alcohol is "underdeveloped". "There is both a lack of evidence and little consensus on how to measure the environmental impact of alcohol," she says. "Currently estimates can vary quite widely depending on which factors are considered and how estimates are calculated." These estimates do show, however, that alcohol "does have a substantial impact" in terms of emissions, says Cook.
A 2021 study in the UK, for example, found that drinks, predominantly tea, coffee and alcohol, contribute around 15% of the greenhouse gas emissions from diets, while a 2018 Swedish study concluded alcohol specifically contributed 3%.
Some researchers have suggested a reduction of "luxury" low-nutrition crops used to make alcoholic drinks, such as vineyards, as a way to make diets more sustainable and free up land, although others have noted that this would be a "controversial cultural topic".
The carbon footprint of alcohol can vary hugely depending on what is being looked at, how far it has travelled, and the method used for evaluating it. A 2022 review of studies about wine, for example, found carbon
footprints ranging from 0.15 to 3.51kg carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per bottle.
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