What is the Best Way to Buy Your Beer?

When it comes to buying beer, you have two options – cans or glass bottles. And while the environment may not be the first thing on your mind when you’re reaching for a drink, it’s definitely worth knowing the impact of your choice. Read on to find out what’s best when it comes to buying beer.

Bottled up

The first plus point for bottles is that they are recyclable. And now, with recycling in full swing, most glass bottles are produced using recycled materials – usually around 30 percent. In addition to this, glass production for beer bottles also uses silica – an abundant resource with little environmental impact.

But there is also a downside to glass. For one, it is considerably heavier than metal. The average 12oz glass bottle weighs around 170g, while a 12oz can weighs just 15g. Ok, you can handle the extra 150g when you’re picking up your beer. But what about transportation? That extra weight soon adds up when you have a truck full of bottles.

Because glass can break easier than cans, bottles also require packaging in thick cardboard to stop them breaking. As a result of the packaging and glass weight, the carbon footprint of bottles is higher than that of cans. It’s estimated that for transportation alone, a bottle causes 20 percent extra greenhouse gas emissions than a can.

Yes we can

So how about cans? As well as contributing less greenhouse gases, they are made with more recycled content than glass. On average, cans are made from 70 percent recycled content, with people 20 percent more likely to recycle cans than glass too.

There is a downside though. To produce aluminium for cans, producers need to extract bauxite – a clay mineral containing aluminium hydroxide as well as iron, sulphur, titanium and chromium. Much like fracking – as discussed in the article ‘Hydraulic Fracture, Gas Seepage and other Environmental Issues Concerning Shale Gas’ – the mining process for bauxite causes considerable damage to local terrain as well as letting off a lot of dust into the earth’s atmosphere.

Is flawless beer storage unattainable?

No matter how good recycling gets, new aluminium will always be a part of the can making process. This means, unfortunately, that neither method of containing beer is flawless. You can, of course, reduce the negative effect of your beer’s can or bottle by making sure you recycle afterwards. But the only way of removing the impact completely is to drink it straight from the tap… and nobody wants that.