Taking Responsibility for Carbon

At Accolade Wines we are committed to sustainability, and it remains one of our core strategic pillars.

The majority of Accolade Wines’ brands sold in the EU and UK have been certified as carbon neutral since 2020, and 98% of all our packaging across Australia and Europe is recyclable.

This has been a genuine source of pride and motivation for us. The products that achieved carbon neutrality did so through an analysis by the Carbon Trust including measuring and verifying the carbon footprint, making carbon reductions where possible, committing to future reductions, and the purchasing of gold standard carbon offsets for any remaining emissions. This certification process has allowed us to communicate a product’s carbon neutrality on pack, online, in print and via other marketing materials.

Recently, there has been increased scrutiny around carbon offsetting and carbon neutrality claims, and this, combined with evolving environmental regulations in the UK and Europe, has meant we have taken a proactive approach to review our future sustainability strategy.

Following this review, we decided to take the following steps:

• We are focusing on our path to Net Zero and our journey to having our Science Based Targets established and verified by March 2025 (Companies taking action – Science Based Targets);
• We have moved to a carbon reducing commitment, working alongside third party organisations to assess and focus on emissions reductions throughout the supply chain;
• We are removing any claim to a product’s “carbon neutrality”;
• We are also removing all references to carbon neutrality in our consumer communications and have replaced this with a simple URL leading all interested parties to regularly updated information about our sustainability strategies.

With regards to the removal of carbon neutrality labelling from our products, and due to the complexity of our supply chain operations and the breadth of our product portfolio, this process has taken some time to implement. We are currently working through a transition period of removing the carbon neutrality labels and roundels from our product packaging, which we aim to complete by the end of January 2024. Due to their long shelf life and infrequent production schedules, some products with carbon neutral labels are likely to remain on shelf beyond January 2024.

As our carbon neutrality verification evolves into a carbon reducing strategy, we will continue to work with the Carbon Trust to measure and reduce our carbon footprint and increase our ambition to meet climate targets.

Reducing Carbon

We are committed to a year-on-year reduction in our product supply chain’s carbon emissions and are progressing a range of carbon reduction initiatives across our business including light weighting glass bottles, alternative packaging innovation and renewable energy.

Across our portfolio, we are aiming to light weight the vast majority of our glass bottles to reduce CO2 emissions. This initiative is well-advanced across our Europe portfolio of wines and we have commenced the program in Australia and New Zealand.

We are increasing our efforts to educate consumers on the advantages of choosing more sustainable formats such as boxed wine and aluminium cans, whilst focusing heavily on these via our innovation strategies.

The benefits of boxed wine include emissions reductions through transport and storage savings due to its more compact shape, lower usage of water and energy in production and the majority of the packaging being 100% recyclable. There are a number of other benefits including it being better value for money and having a longer shelf life due to the packs ability to prevent oxygen from entering through the tap pour.

As part of our innovation strategy, we are exploring further redesigns and improvements of our boxed wines and are continuing our focus on educating consumers on the format’s sustainability credentials.

We’re also making investments in on-site renewable energy including a large-scale solar installation at our grape processing facility Berri Estates in South Australia in 2024.

Product Carbon Footprinting

For a number of years, we have been working alongside the Carbon Trust to calculate our Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) for products sold within the European market.

This process measures the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the whole life cycle of a product, from the extraction of raw materials and manufacturing at vineyard level right through to its disposal.

The analysis of these PCFs provide important insights for further packaging innovations as we work towards creating new and more sustainable concepts with lower carbon footprints.

Please see our 2020 Qualifying Explanatory Statement here.