Plastic pop bottles do work well for beer or cider, with a few caveats. Commonly available in 500mL, 1L and 2L sizes, these are a great inexpensive way to store your beer. Pop bottles are reasonably easy to clean and are designed to hold pressure. We stock PET Bottle Caps which are available for free when you’re bottling with us, what’s not to like?

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The main disadvantage to PET pop bottles is they do not block light. Beer is degraded by light fairly quickly. Most pop bottles are at best green, which does help reduce light intrusion but doesn’t effectively stop it.

PET will also allow some oxygen intrusion in to your beer. Oxygen is a tricky little molecule and can actually pass through PET even when it is sealed and holding pressure. We do not recommend PET for long term storage.

Larger sized bottles are quick to fill, but you will need to commit to drinking the entire thing within a day or so of opening it. A 2L pop bottle is about the same size as a 6-pack of cans, so make sure you’re ready to drink that much before opening one!

Bottles and cans and glass, oh my!

I noticed that artisanal beers are now being sold in aluminum cans instead of glass bottles. For me, I associate cans with the cheap beer that I drank in college (Shoutout to PBR).

I clearly missed something. Beyond preservation and convenience however, is there an environmental advantage of using aluminum cans instead of glass bottles?

Also, as a Diet Coke addict, I wanted to extend the scope of this research to plastic bottles too. Should I be drinking Diet Coke in an aluminum can instead of in a plastic bottle?

Okay, I’ll admit the most environmental (and healthiest) solution is to stop drinking Diet Coke and use my Sodastream if I want bubbles.

But still, what about beer and what to do when I really want a Diet Coke?

As usual, it’s complicated.

But long story short:

Aluminum is very energy-intensive to produce, but it can be recycled indefinitely and uses 95% less energy to produce recycled aluminum than to make new aluminum.

Plastic is less energy-intensive and cheaper to produce than virgin aluminum, but it does not recycle well — it is downcycled and quickly and often, it just ends up in landfills and oceans.

Glass is also less energy-intensive to produce than aluminum is, and like aluminum it recycles well but it’s still more energy intensive to recycle (unless bottles are returned for consignment directly). And moreover, glass is much heavier and more fragile than aluminum and plastic, increasing transport and logistic costs (and associated environmental costs).

The best option for carbonated drinks? Recycled aluminum.

Though it is not clearly labelled if a can is recycled, in the US, the average aluminum can contains 73% recycled content so there’s a good chance your can is made of recycled aluminum.

Let’s dig a little deeper

The paper Life Cycle Assessment of Beverage Packaging and the article Ranked: the environmental impact of five different soft drink containers compare five packaging types for carbonated beverages:

Contact us to discuss your requirements of Aluminum Beer Bottles. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.

1. glass bottle
2. 100% recycled glass bottle
3. PET plastic bottle
4. aluminum can
5. 100% recycled aluminum can

Glass

I initially thought glass was the most environmentally-friendly of the packaging types, but in fact, both versions, new and recycled, have the worst environmental impacts according to the study mentioned above (the study evaluates a number of impact categories including climate change, human toxicity, ozone layer depletion and more):

A 33cl empty glass beer bottle weighs in at 210 grams where the equivalent 33cl aluminum weighs 17 grams, or 12 times less.

The sheer weight of glass means that it requires a lot of resources (silica sand and dolomite) and energy (to melt materials), but the real issue is transport. Because glass weighs on the order of 10x more than aluminum and plastic, carbon emissions from transporting glass bottles are much higher than transporting cans or plastic bottles.

Recycled glass is better than virgin glass, but again, because of its weight and composition, it requires 90% more energy to recycle than aluminum does, and glass is just complicated to recycle.

Plastic

Plastic has several advantages: it is lightweight and generates two times less CO2 as aluminum during production. And it requires less energy to recycle due to lower temperatures involved in melting the raw material.

BUT it has harmful environmental effects and does not recycle infinitely like glass and aluminum. Recycled plastic can be used 1–2 times for bottles before being downcycled to a lower quality plastic (example plastic bags).

Also, the recycled content of plastic bottles today is a mere 3–10%, whereas aluminum cans are composed of 73% recycled content. Coca Cola is moving towards selling 100% recycled plastic bottles, but again, this does not negate the fact that recycled plastic will end quickly in a landfill after a couple cycles, whereas recycled aluminum and glass can be used indefinitely.

Moreover, recycling rates for plastic are just much lower than rates for aluminum and glass and thus 80% of plastic has accumulated in landfills, dumps or the natural environment.

Aluminum

Manufacturing new aluminum is hugely energy-intensive, much more so than manufacturing new plastic or glass.

Why? Aluminum is trapped in bauxite ore. It requires 5 tons of bauxite to get 1 ton of aluminum and the chemical process for extracting the aluminum is not only very energy-intensive, but it leaves behind a toxic red sludge which releases Perfluorocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas. See the video below for a great explanation about manufacturing aluminum and the aluminum versus plastic debate.

However, because aluminum is extremely lightweight and easy to transport, and especially because aluminum recycles indefinitely and recycled aluminum takes 95% less energy to produce than new aluminum, recycled aluminum comes in as a clear winner for the best packaging type for carbonated drinks in terms of environmental impact.

Conclusion

Recycled aluminum comes out as a clean winner among the package types for beverages — a fact that manufacturers are clearly aware of as beer makers are moving from bottles to cans and drink makers like Coca Cola and Danone are also announcing selling water in recycled aluminum cans instead of plastic bottles.

Wait, what — canned water?! This is ridiculous. As the video above concludes, we need to avoid falling into Jevons Paradox which states that when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, the rate of consumption rises due to increasing demand.

All packaging, new or recycled, requires a lot of energy to make. So above all, we must cut down on using containers that we throw away or recycle after using, no matter the material and use refillable bottles instead.

Our local beer maker BAPBAP introduced a 1.89L reusable “growler” (a jug-like container used to transport draft beer) that you can fill with any of their beers for a deposit.

Gallia, another Paris-based beer maker, is working towards recuperating glass bottles to reuse directly (which is much better than going through the recycling process) but after some experimentation, they put this effort on pause after running into logistical roadblocks (mainly having to do with the labels!). But they insist it’s just a “pause” and that they’re actively researching ways to make this recovery program happen and other ideas to reduce their environmental impact.

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