Cantina di Soave has taken new initiatives and strategies to help protect the environment.

One subject that this Verona-area producer has always been sensitive to is saving energy involved in production. The company continues to invest in new methodologies and equipment to lower energy use, and to ramp up, every year, its efforts to improve sustainability.

One significant component of this “commitment to green” is its joint project with UPM Raflatac. Production of a bottle of wine necessarily involves some waste products. Cantina di Soave’s RafCycle project has made it possible to recycle such waste into new paper products made by UPM paper manufacturing, thus avoiding wastage and giving such products a new life and a new purpose.

Since Cantina di Soave launched the program three years ago, it has re-cycled 62 tons of siliconized paper. By not discarding as waste those 62 tons, and by re-cycling them instead, the winery has saved 760,583 kilowatt hours, the equivalent of the electricity needed to light the Eiffel Tower for 15 months.

“Our participation in the RafCycle project is a wonderful example of a virtuous economic cycle towards sustainability. An apparently small action, such as not throwing away siliconized paper but recycling it becomes, instead, on a large scale, a significant savings in energy. This exemplifies an intelligent way to utilize materials and resources, and just one more step that we are taking as we move in that direction,” says Cantina di Soave director Bruno Trentini.