Wine bottles and its non poisonous composition of glass

The State of Existence

Wine Kept Its Promise. Plastic Didn’t. Eight Thousand years of glass has been ignored. The bottle wine has never been betrayed.

People on a plane

Three Rows Ahead ~ My Environmental Hero

He was three rows ahead of me, seat C, reading for the entire flight. Not scrolling. Not dozing. Reading, the way people used to before phones, spine bent, pen in hand, marking pages like the words mattered. He looked so much like Johan Rockström that I couldn’t help myself. Johan Rockstrom, for those of you who don’t know, is Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research’s and Professor in Earth System Science at the University of Potsdam. Yeah, I know light years ahead of us, but I’m studying.

As I leaned over to the young man next to me. “That might be Johan Rockström,” I said. “Planetary boundaries. The scientist who’s spent his career mapping exactly how close we are to breaking the systems that keep this planet livable.” The young man had never heard the name, but I told him anyway.

Johan Rockstrom

When The Plane Landed

The man in seat C stood first. He looked into my eyes h-a-r-d for three second. Long enough to register something, though I couldn’t tell what. Judgment, maybe. Or just the distraction of someone with somewhere urgent to be. Then he was gone. First off the plane. Past everyone. I used to think that was rudeness.

Now I think it was something else. People who carry warnings the size of planetary boundaries don’t have time for goodbyes. They have deadlines the rest of us haven’t caught up to yet. That wasn’t a cold exit. That was a man protecting the thing he’d built his life around.

Wine has never needed to rush like that

For eight thousand years, wine has trusted its bottle to do one job: hold something precious, protect it, and let it be used again. Glass, refilled and reused for centuries before recycling was even a word anyone needed. Then, in about fifty years, the rest of the beverage world found a shortcut. Plastic. Cheap, fast, disposable. Convenient in a way glass never tried to be.

Piles of plastic bottles

Here’s what that shortcut costs

Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is buying a plastic bottle. Then another. Then another. Every minute, roughly one million plastic bottles are purchased worldwide. That’s 1.4 billion a day. Nearly 482 billion a year. Only about nine percent of it ever gets recycled. This makes me cry.

Answers

Norway shows what’s possible when a system actually asks. Over 90 percent of its bottles come back. Not because Norwegians care more than the rest of us. Because their system makes returning a bottle as automatic as buying one.

Recycle Symbol

America hasn’t asked yet

Only ten states have a deposit system at all. Forty have nothing. Some of the biggest bottle-consuming states in the country, Texas, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, have never had one. Can you even imagine!

So here is where wine comes back in

Wine already kept its promise once, for eight thousand years. It can keep another one now. This is the small ask. Put the recycling information on the label. Every bottle. Every winery. Make it as ordinary as the vintage year, the appellation, the alcohol content. Not a redesign of the industry. Just a label that tells the truth about where the bottle can go next. It is not a lot to ask

But it is where urgency has to start, small, specific, doable this year, not someday. Once wine leads on this, the industry has standing to ask something much bigger of everyone else. Because the rest of the world is still catching up to what wine already knows.

That a bottle is not disposable. That it was never meant to be the end of the story. That the man in seat C, and Rockström, and every planetary boundary he has spent his life mapping, are all pointing at the same precipice.

We are closer to it than most people can fathom

Wine can be the industry that says so, out loud, on every label. Are you with me? Com’mon! Are you with me? To not be saying a lot about wine, I don’t think I was sent to California from Maine to just spin my wheels!

© Jo Diaz, August 4, 2026, All rights reserved.

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Written by Jo Diaz, a partner of Diaz Communications, who is helping to make stars realize their dreams.
Edited by partner Jose Diaz.

To reprint, please contact Jo Diaz: jo@diaz-communications.com