By C-pher Guns Beer and Other Things
Hello everyone, once again I have to thank my Beer Drinking friends for another topic Idea regarding the world of beer.
There’s a manager for a local Packy that asked how we prefer our beer, in cans or bottles. That brought up a debate on which is greener…so, I figured I would start looking into this to see…I mean, one has to be better than the other, right??
And when I’m talking better, I’m talking for the envrionment, not taste…if we want to discuss bottle vs can in general, then go back to when I wrote about this earlier in the post, Wait, what’s that about our beer??
So, I started off by trying to find out which was more eco-friendly…and as anyone that’s taken some chemistry in the past knows, glass is MUCH easier on the environment to produce.
As we know, aluminum is made from bauxite and glass is made from silica.
The mining of bauxite requires substantial, land-scarring efforts to extract from the Earth. With that, the United States imports virtually all of its bauxite from Australia, Guinea, and Jamaica, where mining operations have caused a lot of environmental controversies. By contrast, glass is made from the abundance of silica that’s available right here in the US.
So, if we take into account the amount of fossil fuels that go into Mining, then shipping and exporting to the US, then into the refinement…glass is a clear winner from ground to dock.
What I’ve been able to find is that the average 12 oz container (glass or can) for refining only, is about 2.07 kw hours of electricity for the can. The bottle is about 1.09 kw hours to produce. That means that the production of a virgin aluminum can is twice as energy intensive as the bottle.
Notice that I said these figures are for virgin containers. If we take into account, the amount of recycled materials in these containers…it seems the numbers change. The number are showing that most beer cans contain about 40% recycled aluminum. That’s a huge difference from glass that’s only about 20% to 30% recycled glass. But that’s not all, it seems that the energy savings by using recycled materials made a huge difference. Because we’re taking out the mining, shipping, refining, aluminum starts to take advantage. Being that there’s more recycled material in that next container, it seems that we’re gaining some ground in the can.
From what I can find, the energy savings are about 96% over virgin for the production of a 12ox can. The bottle yields only about a 27% savings for a 12oz bottle due to the fact that there’s less recycled materials on the next run of that bottle. So, if your favorite brewery is using second hand aluminum for their cans, they start to narrow the gap on their carbon footprint.
So, can’s are catching up to being as green as bottles.
But wait, there’s more to think about. We have to talk about the distribution of the unfilled and filled cans/bottles. What does that mean for the greener option of bottles?
If we consider them getting to the brewery to be filled…the edge starts to vanish depending on the distance the empty can had to travel. If we’re talking empty cans, they weigh about 13 grams, which is about a half an once. A bottle weighs about 6 ounces. So, we know that we need more fuel to transport heavier items, so we have to factor in emissions and fuel consumption. With this though, the can comes in WAY ahead.
It seems that Germany’s Wuppertal Institute did a study to figure this out…which is good for me as they saved me the time of looking this up. They claim that once a cross-country truck journey is factored into the equation, a bottle ends up emitting 20 percent more greenhouse gases than a can. (In this example, the hypothetical can is made from 100 percent virgin aluminum; the recycled content of the glass bottle is not specified, but the energy required to mine the necessary silica is included in the calculation.)
So, if we want to take this out of the equation, then drink locally at the brewery. As I’m sure that cans and bottle have to travel hundreds of miles from where they are made, to a distributer and then to the bottling/canning locations.
Anyway, back on topic…it seems that in terms of recycling, about 45% of cans are recycled in comparison of 25% of bottles. I guess it’s expensive to sort these bottles, as they have to separate them by color. And it seems that almost all towns don’t even deal with recycling the green bottles because of the metals in them that are needed to turn them green. So, most of those just go into a landfill as the costs of removing these during the recycling process is very expensive.
Now, if we were to go back in the days when I was younger, and bottle were able to refilled, bottle would kill the winning eco-friendliness of cans. While it’s an old study, 2001 and the only one I saw referenced, the European Commision found that if we used a refillable bottle around 20 times with a recycling rate of about 40%, and the distance of distribution was less than 2600 miles, bottles would still be more eco-friendly than recycled cans. So, why aren’t we doing this? There’s parts of Canada and Europe that refill bottles, so I’m not sure why we stopped here in the US.
It seems that one of the people on our post of discussion today had the right idea. Just use kegs! It seems that this is by far the greenest way to go. While kegs may be heavy and add to the carbon footprint…we’re looking at a vessel that is refillable. It’s used for around 15-20 years depending on how it’s handled. And actually, when figured out by weight…it’s lighter per drink than glass. Even if we work out the same data as we have above…empty, a keg weighs in at about 30 pounds and holds 15.5 gallons. That’s about 3 ounces of packaging per 12 oz beer instead of 6 oz per bottle.
So, if you’re really worried about the carbon footprint, then drink local. The biggest carbon footprint in that route is how they wash their glasses.
Drinking Local is something that I’ve been a fan of since I got into craft beer over 20 years ago. Go to the source, not only will you get fresher, better tasting beer…you get to see new country side, and if you’re willing…talk to the people that make your favorite beers. You’d be surprised how welcoming most breweries are when you ask them questions. They are proud of the beer they make, and they like to talk about…and when they see that same enthusiasm in the person they are talking to, may even share a few pints with you.
Cheers!
C-pher