Ryan - I’m going to check with our rep on the stand up pulp shippers, as they are really strong, and the company is located in LA area, I think. Will let you know.
Accepting responsibility for damage and heat damage denies you and the winery one thing: the
wine! We wineries work hard to ship within ever-tightening weather windows in which to ship, spend money to insulate the shipment and accomplish what we all want: your satisfaction with the product we produced and took money for, and wine you wanted to enjoy! Styro is a pain for all the reasons listed above, but it is the best way of accomplishing what both the winery and the customer want.
So for those who advocate for the styrofoam, can you perhaps help me understand why the shippers from some wineries always fall apart, while others, making the same trans-continental journey, do not? Is there a good brand and a bad brand? Bedrock, Once & Future (I bet they get their shippers from the same place), Lagier Meredith, and yes, EMH always leave me with snow globe bits all over the place.
Other than one disastrously damaged box (UPS fault), I never have more than the occasional stray bit on Rhys shipments. The shipments I get from Edmunds St. John are always quite clean.
I, too, wish that styro would go away. While I can certainly see the rationale for using it for insulating purposes, I still would prefer to pay for for quicker shipping in non-styro packaging or wait until weather permits safe shipping without the need for insulation.
What REALLY gets me is when other products are shipped with significant amounts of styro. We ordered some furniture that, when it arrived, was packed with so much styrofoam that I had to fill out the car just to take it to a recycling center. Thank goodness we even have one. It’s not the mess that bothers me as much as the environmental impact. Furniture (and so many other equivalent goods) does NOT need insulation…get rid of that styro sh*t, especially for things like that!
I actually completely disagree. The data from post #94 shows that styrofoam does make a significant difference. It takes just one day for bottle temperatures to equilibrate to ambient temperature in cardboard, versus 2 days in styrofoam (Also, day 1 ambient temps were cooler for the cardboard group, which further speaks to the superior insulation of styrofoam).
Now, does it justify the styrofoam waste, if you’re shipping a) during fall/spring temperatures b) longer distances/times such as cross country? Probably not. We probably freak out too much about temperature already. But, consider a scenario where temperatures are perfect for most of the cross country journey, but there’s a random freakishly cold or hot day. In cardboard, your bottles will reach ambient temperature. Your bottles in styro will not.
Every positive thing you do for the environment (or anything else) is a positive and better than not doing it, so I’m not discouraging anyone from advocating for better materials, reusing boxes, and so forth.
But we probably shouldn’t congratulate ourselves very much for whatever we do. If we’re honest, our habit of having 4 pound bottles and 48 pound cases shipped around the country and the world by plane, truck and/or boat, and all the packaging materials and energy consumption that surrounds that, is quite environmentally unfriendly.
In environmentalism, as in many other things, I’ve noticed there is kind of a substitution effect, where doing a few small good things (recycling, or at least dumping things in recycling bins and telling ourselves they’re getting recycled, driving a Prius, sending some money to an environmental charity) alleviates our consciences for doing much larger bad things (air travel, buying tons of stuff on the internet for home delivery, owning one or more big houses). People do that all the time with morality/religion/ethics, diet, parenting, and so forth.
Probably most people who read this far are thinking “not me, that’s just other people.” Okay, but it’s probably worth a harder look from time to time.
Probably just the specific styrofoam used and the quality of it. It’s an industrial product, with unlimited potential variation from one producer or product to the next.
I’m confused. It never equilibriates in any of them, because the ambient temp is swinging a lot faster than both time constants. The random freakishly hot day will not cause your bottles to reach that freakishly hot ambient temperature, as #94 shows very clearly. Since pulp shippers are also somewhat more common than heavy duty cardboard, look at post #97. Ambient peaks are in the low 90s for several days (with lows in the low 70s) and the bottles barely get above 75. This looks perfectly fine to me.
By the end of the experiment, bottle temperature not only match ambient temperature at times, but exceeds ambient temperatures a couple times. The trough of Day 1 is pretty much equal to the cardboard bottle temperature. If you track the temperature deltas for styro and cardboard, the styro temp difference is much wider than the cardboard for the first 2 days, which demonstrable demonstrates that styrofoam is a superior insulator. but of course, ambient temperatures change dramatically with time, so when the temperatures equilibrate, may still be well below 80F
Onto the real point, which is whether the superior insulation even matters in the big picture as long as bottle temperatures don’t exceed 80F. I think not. If I knew that a UPS truck would never ever exceed the conditions set forth in the graph, then I would definitely agree with you. But I don’t know UPS truck temperatures.
“At times” is nowhere near the same as reaches ambient on a hot day. Of course you can expect it to slowly come up to temperature, but all of these shippers when full are on a many day time-constant, maybe 3-5 days, so you will at most see somewhere around the average on a cross-country trip.
Anyway, seems we roughly agree and just have some semantic differences. I wouldn’t ship when actual temps were in the mid 90s, but if temps are mid 70s to 80ish, I feel very very comfortable with this data even considering hotter daytime temps in a truck. I also think that practically speaking the styro isn’t going to buy more than a few degrees peak temp on practical shipping routes.
The problem isn’t the consumer; if you have mandatory recycling and one blue bin, this is what you get. I do wish they would only ask for stuff they KNOW they can recycle.
But you can reuse what can’t be recycled, and that is what I try to do with lots of different stuff, not just wine shippers
Great post. The coffee place near me is all cool and hip and enviro-friendly and when my wife asks for a straw they loudly tell her that they’re trying to save the planet so they prefer not to hand out straws, which they keep behind the register so they can virtue-signal whenever someone asks for a straw. But then you ask them why they give you butter in little plastic containers when you get a scone, and why they give you a hard plastic knife with it, and why they give you a cold drink in a large plastic cup. The least hip hipster snickers and the hippest hipster just mumbles that they’re “trying”. “Not very hard,” you tell them smugly, feeling all superior. And who wants butter on a bacon-cheddar scone anyway?
As far as styrofoam, it is a little less than R-4 per inch. So look at the shipper you get. A lot of styro shippers aren’t made so much for temperature control as they are for damage control. They add a little bit of cushion so your bottles don’t break. You don’t need a thick slab to provide some cushioning. The reason the bottoms pop out is that they’re usually only like a half inch. Some shippers are made with a slot for a cold pack, but not all of them are and not all of them are made for temp control.
And speaking of recycling, there are many alternatives to styrofoam. They melt down plastic bottles and spin them into fibers. Pack those together and you get the same insulating factor you get with styrofoam. They also have things like flocked cotton and rock wool where materials are pulverized and then mixed with a resin to form fluffy insulating material. There’s a lot of research into insulating materials because people need to ship medical supplies and even organs, as well as other perishables, and they may be going to places far away without good refrigeration. All of these insulating products are available and in use today. It’s just the wine industry that doesn’t use them.
And I was told by someone in CA that retailers are not allowed to take the styro shippers from customers. I have no clue whether that’s true or not, but I was disappointed to hear it. Styro doesn’t really harbor bacteria, etc. The fact that it’s of no use to any living thing is why it never breaks down.
Anyway, I save all my styro shippers to give to John for his craft projects!
I recycle all my styro shippers to my local wine shop. They are extremely happy to take them. Easily half of all wine shipments I receive are in previously used styro shippers, some likely multiple times by the outside looks of them.
I would totally do that if they’d take them. I’ll keep asking around. On the east coast I used to do it all the time. Of course, they’re all slightly different in sizes so the boxes they will need must match up.
