I remember refillable bottles. Most people under the age of 40 wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. I worked in a dairy as a teenager. The empty bottles were picked up at each home and came back with the milkman in the afternoon. They were washed that evening and refilled the next day. Simple.
No one can convince me that reusing a bottle uses more energy than recycling a bottle, yet recycling has evolved to be our moral imperative and reusable bottles are just about extinct. We can credit the departure from “refillable” to “no deposit-no return” as the beginning of the end. That step began to fill our dumps. Further transition to use plastic containers for literally everything we purchased made the problem untenable. In fact, our wasteful, throwaway society filled dumps and littered roadsides because no value was placed on the bottle or the plastic. A few states tried to stem the throwaway mindset by paying for returns, but so few states pursued the policy it just died from neglect. Thankfully, we at least pursue a voluntary recycling ethic today.
When the dumps filled up with glass and plastic, communities pursued recycling, not with the objective to save energy, but rather to avert a costly, over capacity dump. We’ve gone almost full circle now. Today the really “in thing” is to support local businesses and nurture a sustainable local economy. So people are starting to look for milk in glass bottles again, and use other symbols of conservation like reusable grocery bags. Unfortunately, we may be beyond the point of no return.
I can recount the history of landfills in Bedford, NH as a typical example of what occurred in the aftermath of “no deposit-no return” bottles, plastic and the Clean Air Act. Bedford was founded in the early 1700s. For more than 200 years a dump was maintained on a small 2 acre site almost in the center of town. The refuse was burned. It was burned because the items that were deposited at the dump would burn. Largely an agricultural community, organic material was composted at home or fed to the animals, and all glass bottles were returned to their source and reused. People “canned” their meats and vegetables in reusable glass jars. Plastic didn’t exist. The dump was not a very busy place.
The clean air act banned municipal burning at the dump. So a landfill was required. We converted from polluting the air to polluting the ground. Along with landfills came tons of “no deposit- no return” glass and plastic bottles and containers. Within a few years the dump was full. In less than 30 years the land was essentially turned into a “superfund” waste site and closed. Little Bedford is but a microcosm of what happened throughout the country. Today we have a “transfer station”. I liken this to putting something in the toilet and flushing it down. After it disappears it’s no longer my problem. These transfer stations have become collection points for massive centralized Walmart style landfills at far away locations. Think of the energy that's wasted in just moving the trash around the country. Someday they’ll be super-superfund sites.
Opponents of reusing bottles say that the process uses more energy and is more costly. I agree with the cost argument, but only because we built a worldwide business model around a throwaway product and we shouldn’t expect that model to work for both. For example, at one time there were over 2700 Coca-Cola bottling plants in America. Each bottler was franchised and served a local community. We had a locally based, sustainable community business model. Shipping both ways was efficient because the trucks that delivered full bottles picked up the empties and returned them for reuse. The supply chain management was simple and locally based. Milk delivery was even more localized, sometimes confined to neighborhoods.
Contrast that with a bottle of Sam’s Cola that might originate from Arkansas and be transported in trailer trucks to a regional distribution center. From there the cola is packaged with other goods, put on another trailer truck, and delivered to a local Walmart or Sam’s Club. The empty trailer truck returns to some other place to pick up another load. The interstates are full of truckers pulling empty trailers. If the empty bottle is lucky enough to find its way to a recycling center- again more trucking involved- then the plastic is converted to some other product- like Polar Fleece for blankets or the like- more energy is consumed, and we’re supposed to feel good about that. Remember wool? It only needs grass.
The attached article got me going on this issue as it highlights what could be the final demise of refillable beer bottles in America, and possibly the last sad and unfortunate victim of our "no deposit-no return" economy.
ST. MARYS, Pa., Aug. 18, 2010
Reusable Beer Bottles Facing Extinction
Only 2 Pennsylvania Breweries Still Take Empties Back to Reuse; 1 Is About to Quit, It's All Down to Straub
For years, it was the way breweries did business: sell bottles, then take back the empties. It just made sense, especially to folks weaned in the lean days of the Great Depression and World War II, that bottles should be scrubbed and refilled, not thrown away.
These days, in a culture where nearly everything is disposable, recycling is a rite and energy costs are high, the decision of whether to toss tradition into the trash heap lies with one brewery about 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.
The 138-year-old, family-owned Straub Brewery is begging customers - mostly in Pennsylvania, but also some in Ohio, New York and Virginia - to return thousands of empty cases. If enough customers do, Straub will keep selling cases of 12- and 16-ounce returnable bottles past year's end.
"It's not that we're totally into 'green,' but we think it's the right thing to do," said Dan Straub, great-grandson of company founder Peter Straub and the brewery's semiretired vice president. "Our philosophy is, 'Why recycle when you can reuse?"'
One other brewer - the nation's oldest, D.G. Yuengling & Son of Pottsville, Pa. - still sells and gathers returnables. But it expects to phase them out by summer's end, leaving Straub as what experts believe is the last holdout in the U.S.
Returnable bottles need to be cleaned, requiring extra energy. They are heavier so they won't break and must be shipped both ways, meaning fuel use and costs are significant for all but the smallest regional breweries. The larger breweries - Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors - gave up on returnables years ago because their costs multiplied with national distribution.
Straub customers pay a $1.50 deposit per 24-bottle case and can get it back or just buy another case when they return the bottles to the store, distributor or brewery.
The brewery spent more than $900,000 about five years ago to buy 150,000 cases of returnable bottles, and most of them are gone - some broken, some thrown away, but, brewery officials suspect, most retained by customers unaccustomed to returning them or filled with home brews.
The brewery has so few bottles left, it's affecting production.
Straub can produce 1,500 24-bottle cases of 16-ounce returnables and 2,100 cases of 12-ounce returnables in a day. But one recent batch of 16-ounce returnables was just 753 cases - because there were no more empties.
"When the system of returnables works, everybody wins," said Bill Brock, Straub's chief executive and great-great-grandson of the founder. "We're just not getting that glass back."
Soda companies are doing the same thing. LeRoy Telstad said his Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Winona, Minn., is one of only two bottlers in the U.S. that still produces Coke in returnables. The other is in New Mexico.
"We're where Coke came from," Telstad said of his company, which serves four counties. "There used to be 2,700 bottlers of Coke in the United States, so it really was not just regional - it was local."
The returnable-bottle model still works for Telstad because he serves an area less than 70 miles across and because returnable bottles of Coke and a few other flavors with the regional "Sunrise" label are a small fraction of his business. Ninety percent is soft drinks or juices sold in nonreturnable bottles and cans.
"It's become so much of a niche now," Telstad said. "Customers like the nostalgia of it."
Straub doesn't consider returnables a niche product but also doesn't need them to survive. Canned beer, added just last year, has been "flying out the door" and sales have never been better, Brock said.
"If we were a public company, it would be like, 'Dump that line,"' Brock said. "But it's our customers. Their fathers drank it, their grandfathers drank it. It's not just a business decision."
About 12 percent of all U.S. beer was sold in returnable bottles in 1981. Since 2007, the percentage has been negligible, according to statistics kept by the Washington, D.C.-based Beer Institute.
In Pennsylvania, more than a quarter of all beer sold in 1981 was in returnables. The state's antiquated liquor control laws required most beer to be sold by the case through distributors, so returning empty cases wasn't particularly inconvenient.
That has changed as convenience stores and supermarkets have increasingly gotten the OK to sell six- or 12-packs - which come in nonreturnable bottles and cans.
About 20 percent of Straub is sold in kegs, and the brewery will produce about 45,000 cases of bottles and cans this year - with 20 percent of that in returnable bottles, Brock said.
By contrast, Dick Yuengling said the 30,000 cases of 12-ounce returnables his brewery, founded in 1829, will churn out this year is too small of a percentage for him to figure out.
"The consumer's been indoctrinated; we're a throwaway society," he said. "Everybody's environmentally conscious, but if you put a case of returnable bottles in front of them, they say, 'What's that?"'
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