Green Beer Quiz
The Sierra Club just unveiled a new “how green is your beer?” quiz, for Paddy’s day with some good and somewhat surprising information. The glass bottle versus aluminum can item was particularly interesting, and something that I’ve suspected for a long time. (Take the quiz first, I don’t want to give it away.)
http://www.sierraclub.org/howgreen/beer/
Done… OK scroll down
Glass v. can- Shockingly the bottle takes less energy to produce. It is of course not a clear cut winner in the debate though. As an Oregonian I think recycling glass is normal. We’ve got the first bottle bill in the country, and most glass is recycled here (According to the Container Recycling Institute, in Oregon and 10 other deposit states 72.7% of glass carbonated beverage containers were recycled in 2006), but apparently most of America does not recycle glass (in states with no bottle bill only 12.4% were recycled). Glass is heavy and so shipping costs a lot and the raw materials are cheap. (I write about this problem and what several breweries around the country are doing to further glass recycling in my forthcoming Green Beer Report in Ale Street News but you’ll have to wait till that comes out to read about it.) Aluminum is much more expensive, and therefore more commonly actually makes a complete loop in the recycling stream. (Glass, even in some areas where collected for recycling often ends up being landfilled).
Then there’s the added weight of shipping glass, and the fact that refillable bottles are almost unheard of these days. Captured By Porches in St. Helens, Oregon recently introduced a refillable bottle. Owner Dylan Goldsmith is happy with the initial response, and has seen good return rates. The Bottle Pool in Canadian provinces is a good model for using returnable, refillable bottles. The program in Ontario has high rates of participation, (the Beer Store, which runs the program claims over 90% return rates, though Ontario craft brewers say that is not reflected in the amount of bottles that make it back to breweries). Even if we figure the rate of reuse at 75% that’s a huge savings in energy required to make new bottles. The average refillable bottle can be reused 8 times before it must be crushed and remade into glass. The challenge for breweries in North America is getting bottles back from far off markets. For Captured By Porches, this is not an issue as they have only local distribution.
Keep tuned to this section for a more in-depth look at the bottle vs. can debate. Happy Paddy’s day.