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Broken Compass Wine
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Footprint

The parts we can weigh

Most wine sustainability copy is adjectives. This page is the handful of things we can actually put a number on, including the one where we currently fall short.

Glass, in grams

The heaviest thing about a bottle of wine is the bottle.

Accord target
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The average a signatory commits to hold a 75cl still bottle below, by the end of 2026.

Our average
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Across every 75cl still bottle in stock that declares a weight, which is the scope the Accord asks for. Above the target, so we do not meet it.

Under 420g
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Of the 132 that declare a weight, so 47% of what we can measure.

Lightest
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The heaviest in the range is 760 g. That gap is nearly two bottles of glass.

Not declared
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Lines where nobody in the chain has given us a weight. We are asking, supplier by supplier.

The Bottle Weight Accord

Glass is between a third and a half of the greenhouse gas footprint of a bottle of wine. Not the farming, not the shipping, the bottle. A heavy bottle takes more sand and more furnace heat to make and more fuel to move, and it does nothing at all for what is inside it.

The Sustainable Wine Roundtable launched the Bottle Weight Accord in November 2023 to deal with exactly this. Signatories commit to bringing the average weight of their 75cl still wine bottles below 420 grams by the end of 2026. It now covers more than two and a half billion bottles a year. A Sparkling Bottle Weight Accord follows, with different benchmarks, because a sparkling bottle holds real pressure and cannot be thinned the same way.

Two things about that wording matter, and most retailers quietly skip both. It is an average across a whole book, not a limit that any single bottle passes or fails. And it is a commitment made by signatories. We have not signed it. We use it here as the benchmark we measure ourselves against, because it is the clearest number the trade has agreed on, and we would rather be judged against someone else's standard than one we wrote for ourselves.

Where we actually stand

132 of the 255 still 75cl wines in stock declare an empty glass weight. Of those, 62 come in under 420 grams. That is the number a lot of shops would print on its own, and it looks good.

Here is the number that goes with it. Our average across those 132 bottles is 465 grams, which sits above the Accord target of 420. On the measure the Accord actually uses, we do not currently meet it. A handful of very heavy bottles, up to 760 grams, pull the average up and no amount of light glass elsewhere hides that.

Measured apart from all of that: 11 bottles in the range are not 75cl still wine, and they run from 250 to 835 grams. Traditional method glass has to hold real pressure, and half bottles carry more glass per millilitre than a full one, so folding either into the figure above would flatter or punish us for the wrong reason. They are counted, they are just counted separately.

The other 123 lines declare nothing at all, which is its own problem. We cannot report an honest average on a range where 48% of the glass is unmeasured, so we are asking every supplier for the empty weight of the bottle as a standing part of our product data request. As those come back, this page moves. It is computed from live stock every time you load it, not typed in and forgotten.

What we will not do is drop the heavy bottles quietly to make the figure look better. Some of them are excellent wines from small growers who buy the glass their bottler stocks. The honest route is to keep asking, keep publishing, and let you see the range for what it is.

Carbon literacy

Certified Carbon Literate

Our founder is Certified Carbon Literate. That is a day of accredited training from the Carbon Literacy Project covering the science of climate change, the carbon cost of the things a business actually does, and a commitment to a specific action afterwards.

It is a personal certification and we are going to be precise about that, because being precise about certification is the entire point of this shop. The Carbon Literacy Project also accredits organisations, at Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum, and that is a different and harder thing that we have not done. Bronze needs a registered training initiative for the team as well as a certified leader. We have the second half and not yet the first. When we hold the organisational accreditation we will say so and name the level. Until then, one of us has the certificate and the business does not, and you can hold us to the difference.

Warehouse and delivery

The unglamorous half, and the half we control outright rather than ask a supplier about.

  • Renewable electricity. The warehouse the stock sits in, temperature managed all year, runs on a renewable tariff.
  • All cardboard recycled. Every case, tray and divider that comes in goes back out to be recycled.
  • Nothing to landfill. No part of our waste stream goes to landfill.
  • No plastic in delivery packaging. No pillows, no bubble wrap, no shrink. Wine travels in moulded pulp and cardboard, which goes straight in your recycling.
  • Two electric vehicles. Local deliveries and trade runs go out on electric.

Carbon removal

A share of every order goes to carbon removal through Stripe Climate, which pools that money with other businesses and buys from the companies working on permanent removal rather than offsets. Trees are good and they are not the same thing: an offset says someone else emitted less, removal takes carbon out and keeps it out.

This is the only line on the page that somebody outside Broken Compass verifies. Stripe takes the contribution at the point of payment and publishes the badge below, so it is not a claim we can quietly stop making.

Every figure on this page is either computed live from stock or a plain statement of what we do. Where we have not done a thing, or have not signed a thing, we have said so on the same page as the parts that flatter us. That is the only way the good numbers are worth reading.