Green Options

This morning as I woke up to my clock radio, the one minute Project Green segment came on the Rush Limbaugh leaning KNCO AM. It reported on a recent meeting of California wine growers, all 26 of which are talking preliminary to major efforts to green their operations, product, and packaging.

Somehow this doesn’t surprise me. Vintners are acutely aware of the health of their environment, their plants, and the resulting product. With the refined and particular tastes of many of their consumers, a lackluster wine will lead to lackluster profits. Beyond that though, their customers are, I would venture to guess, more likely to be of the LOHAS mindset, choosing what they consume based on more factors then simply the cheapest available. They want everything they touch to have thought, consciousness, and a lighter impact on the planet factored into them.

How can a wine be green? The grapes themselves can of course be organic, the growing method biodynamic. But what else?

Meet Beatrice Ahimbisibwe. She’s a widowed single mother and a school-teacher in Uganda. Plus she creates 5.7 tons worth of carbon offsetting credits annually for TetraPak UK, a company intent on reducing its carbon footprint.

Ahimbisibwe owns a little plot of land on which she grows some of the trees involved in TetraPak’s contract to produce fresh air for all the pollution caused by its production processes. A case study of the carbon sequestration project on EcoSystemMarketplace.com reveals interesting insights into the practices of an emissions offsetting program.