Why is beer still sold as glass bottles. Recently my city removed glass from recyclable items and im guessing thats because its harder to recycle then they believed. However. There are some beer thats comes in both can and bottle and 9 times out of 10 its a bottled version. Aluminum must be cheaper right?
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The biggest factor is the concept of *Economies of Scale.*
While you’re correct that glass bottles cost a bit more in terms of material, that’s only the first part of the story.
Equipment for crimping bottle caps on glass is potentially cheap and mechanically very simple. It’s well within the reach of mom-and-pop breweries working out of a garage. There are lots of options from simple one a a time hand crimpers to pneumatic units that can crimp an entire crate of bottles. Or even fill then crimp in a two step process. Still not unreasonably expensive.
>However. There are some beer thats comes in both can and bottle and 9 times out of 10 its a bottled version.
So for glass bottles, the initial cost of entry is pretty low, and pretty adaptable to your budget. This is why the smaller guys running batch production usually elect to go with glass.
As others have mentioned, recycling bottles is pretty easy on a small scale. Just buy some more caps and a single action hand crimper, wash the bottles. Refill with your own microbrewed hooch and slap a label on. There’s a brewery in my town that gives a nice little discount if you bring their bottles back, because they just end up washing the bottles in hot water either way.
This is in contrast with equipment for filling, seaming, and sealing aluminum cans which just isn’t something you can do by hand, one at a time. For all intents and purposes it needs to be done on a fully automated filling line. Such machinery, aside from requiring regular, potentially time consuming and expensive maintenance/adjustment, just isn’t cheap in any way. Even with used equipment you still need to pay people to install, setup, and troubleshoot, potentiall tosding out a couple hundred cans in the process. Then toy need to hire somone to feed cans into the line and somone else to package up the filled cans, and have a maintenance guy on call if something goes off kilter.
In order to turn a profit with cans you need to brew and sell tons of beer per day on a low profit margin to make back the cost of buying and running such equipment.
A lot of medium sized breweries simply truck their product in refrigerated tankers to a seperate company they contract with. The latter actually fills, labels, and packages the cans for them. The contractor runs their line nearly 24/7 from dozens of different customers. Such a company might dismiss you offhand if you told them you wanted a chump change run of 1000 cans because you just can’t produce that much beer. It wouldn’t be worth the time it would take them to setup the equipment initially for a run, then wash it down afterwards.
>Recently my city removed glass from recyclable items and im guessing thats because its harder to recycle then they believed.
Depends what you do with it afterwards. Removing the labels is probably the biggest issue.
If the labels are gone, glass scrap is useful as an aggregate for concrete or tarmac. Just throw it in the rock crusher with whatever else. But plastic labels wpuld probably gum up the works in that case.
You can also use a certain percentage of glass scrap as an admixture to make the cement that binds concrete together. Can also make fiberglass insulation out of it. Making consumer goods out of recycled glass isn’t the best because of the added color contaminates and the variable composition. You usually end up with a glass that doesn’t have good strength or color.
>Aluminum must be cheaper right?
Aluminum itself degrades over a period of several decades to several hundred years, especially in alkaline soil with a high salt content. While not as fast as steel for example, it’s fairly environmentally innocuous.
Aluminum is ideal for beer containers because it blocks all light and oxygen which preserves the flavor better it’s also a good heat conductor which chills your beer faster in an ice chest. UV Light tends to degrade the flavor of certain beers which is why dark tinted glass is typically used.
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