Oregon Launches First Statewide Refillable Bottle System in U.S.

Did you not sell US brewed beers in returnable bottles? I guess I am showing my age (or is is a Pennsylvania thing?) but I have purchased many, many cases of US brewed beer in returnable bottles. I still use those bottles in my homebrewing; I suspect I have reused some bottles a few hundred times (I recently brewed batch #420).

Cheers!

 

JK, I wonder the same thing - I posed a question to @grilledsquid in post #18 above related to this.

Have you read any articles or whitepapers on the topic of the economics/impacts of returnable bottles?

Cheers!

 

Everything I've read as they disappeared in the 1990s-on noted the high energy/fuel/labor/waste water costs of running the older washers most brewers still used. I think The Lion - one of the last PA brewers to offer them - had constant breakdowns of their unit and parts were no longer available. (There used to be a YouTube video of their last day in W-B).

Plus, as the percentages of refillables went down, the "system" of returns broke down so that brewers weren't getting their bottles back quickly enough or at all, making it economically foolish to buy the more expensive bottles and cases that were designed to make multiple trips. In many non-mandatory deposit states, retailers became more reluctant to go through the bother (labor, storage of unclean bottles, cash refunds, etc) of accepting returns and probably they became a pain for distributors, too.

 

When I was a kid it was my job to take empty pop bottles to the corner store to get the deposit back. We had a metal six pack tote to carry the bottles. Everybody did it. It was a way for kids to get a little money. Kids would scour neighborhood alleys for "empties". Getting pop in worn, re-used bottles was the norm. The system worked and it can be made to work again.

 

Did you ever watch that old British sit-com "Keeping Up Appearances"?

 

When I was in Belize earlier this year, almost all of the beer was various Belikin brands in refillable bottles. Some of the bottles were quite worn, but who cares? Bartenders served every bottle with the neck wrapped in a small paper napkin to wipe off any rust from the bottle lip, but I never saw that it was actually necessary.

 

Yes. You got it right there!

 

We used to actually think "longnecks" tasted better!

 

I had an old buddy (Bob) and he would prefer to go to bars that served beer in longnecks. I never really got it since my preference was drinking beer on draft. I figured I could always drink bottled beer at home (and I would always pour it is a glass anyway).

Cheers!

 

Sounds like the technology has improved from what Straub uses/used:

 

I wouldn't be surprised if those customers wanted it to be "organic" as well.

 

It seems like it just takes a good deposit system to make things work. From this 2013 article from the Toronto Star:

Perhaps some Canadian BA's can chime in?

 

It was very impressive at SN. There were 30+ sensors. The guide had us look at rejected bottles, and said try and find the defects. It wasn't easy to spot them.

 

That article claims this, but no real backup:

The Beer Store's current website has some more stats:

"Highlights of our performance in 2017:

• Over 1.87 billion beverage alcohol containers collected from Ontario consumers (over 1.5 billion beer containers and over 370 million ODRP containers)
• Recovery rate of 86.7% for beer containers
• 96.1% of all refillable beer bottles sold in Ontario were returned – these bottles are reused an average of 15 times before being recycled into new glass bottles
• 80.2% of wine, spirit, cooler and non-Beer Store listed beer containers (ODRP containers) were recovered.
• The Beer Store continues to recover more paper and plastic packaging than the industry generated – which is then sent for recycling
• Over 204,000 tonnes of GHG emissions avoided as a result of these programs – equivalent to taking 43,756 cars off Ontario’s roads and highways"

 

Before the introduction of one-way, disposable containers all fountain soft drinks and draught beer were sold in refillable glass bottles. The disposable steel can made its debut in 1938 and in less than 10 years cans comprised 11 percent of beer market share. Non-refillable glass bottles made up 3 percent and refillable bottles had dropped to 86 percent. By 1984 only 8 percent of beer volume was packaged in refillable bottles. Refillable market share is now less than 4 percent of packaged beer volume. - From the Container Recycling Institute's site.

 

On a deserted island this might make sense but in 21st century Oregon, millions of people and almost as many different bottle sizes/shapes it's doomed to fail.

 

These guys' info is suspect:

This makes no sense. Bottled soft drinks and bottled beer were sold in refillable bottles but fountain soda and draught beer, by definition, were served in glasses, mugs or other such reusable containers. Well, some fountain soda came in paper cups, etc. These paper cones in metal holders were particularly cool (for a kid):

Beer in disposable steel beer cans hit the shelves in January 24, 1935. That’s the day cans of Krueger’s Finest Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale first went on sale in Richmond, VA.

The Beer Institute's Brewers Almanac has said "0%" since 2007.

 

Their most recent number of 3.3% was from 1998. Not exactly "now", that's 20 years ago.

Do they round all of their stats to the nearest whole number?

<1% is not exactly the same as 0%. Zero implies it doesn't exist at all, which doesn't appear to be the case.

This article about Yuengling phasing out refillable bottles in 2010 cited a then-current stat of "0.3%" from the Beer Institute.

 

It appears they must be using Bayern Brewery in Montana. It appears that they are washing and refilling regular 12 oz bottles from any brewery?

https://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/montana-glass-bottle-recycling-craft-brewers-20150827

https://www.bayernbrewery.com/sustainability/

 

BREWERS ALMANAC - Refillable Bottles:

2003 - 2%
2004 - 1%
200 5 - 0.6%
2006 - 0.3%
2007 - 0%

But, really, once you get to under 1-2% does it really matter?

And here's a graph (a combination of two different versions from print & Excel editions of The Brewers Almanac from the late 1960s - 20012 - w/color added):