Tink or Clunk?

Friday, August 3, 2012 7:34 PM by Betty Brennan in Professional and Industry Tips


As I huddle inside at the back end of a nasty heat wave, I have found myself appreciating cold beverages. More specifically, I have been drinking beer. As I took my various containers out to our recycling area, I wondered, what is the greener path, glass or aluminum? I would like to give you a fast sound-bite answer, but I can’t.

The difficulty lies in the difference between where aluminum and glass come from and what they can be used for. While glass bottles take a lot less energy to make compared to aluminum cans, from raw material to finished product, they have a greater transportation cost and a smaller recycling market. Aluminum starts out as bauxite ore, which has to be mined (mostly outside the US), transported, processed, and then formed into cans. The initial costs for aluminum cans are higher, but the aluminum itself has much lower transportation costs once it has been created and a very long recycling life. The math for figuring this out can get rather complicated, and it often becomes a tricky operation to figure out where in the lifespan to compare, but some people have made an effort.

It would be great if everything that could be recycled were recycled, but there has to be a market for what you are recycling. The glass bottle’s share of the beverage container market is losing out to plastic bottles, which means that demand for glass is shrinking. Add to this that colored glass has to be split out from clear glass, which adds cost to glass recycling. Aluminum, on the other hand, is in demand for a lot of products besides cans. How much in demand? Let’s put it this way; even though Illinois doesn’t have a beverage deposit program, you can still make money collecting aluminum cans. Metal recyclers pay for aluminum, which they couldn’t do if aluminum had no market. No one is paying the public for empty glass bottles in Illinois.

The most common argument for glass bottles is that beer tastes better out of a bottle. I would like to put it this way: beer tastes better out of a glass. Pour it from a bottle or a can, but drink it from a glass! Every aluminum can is lined with a water-based polymer that keeps the beer from touching the aluminum. Do drafts pulled at a bar taste like stainless steel? That’s what the beer has been stored in, a keg.

As someone who spends quite a bit of time barefoot, I can really appreciate how much safer cans are, and that safety factor means you can bring cans with you where you can’t bring bottles. So as my favorite brands try the can route, I will be among the first to support them.

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