What’s the most environmentally-friendly form of packaging beer? There are those who swear by aluminium cans and others who champion the glass bottle. Should we really be thinking about plastic?
The answer to the question is of course “it depends”. It depends greatly on the context in which the beer is being packaged. When we first selected our much-loved brown “longneck ale” bottle back in 2013, we were pretty confident that we were walking firmly along a a sustainable path. We were, but just not firmly enough.
Over the 11 years since we introduced it, innumerable Kinnegar drinkers have contacted us to ask whether they can return their bottles. The answer has always been “no”. Although the bottle is designed for washing and refilling in its native Germany, there is no such system for returning and reusing glass beer bottles in Ireland. So our bottle, while theoretically very environmentally friendly, was in fact much less sustainable than we would like. Every 500ml of beer consumed resulted in 370g of glass going straight into the crusher, to be melted down and recycled as a new bottle in the Irish system.
Up until recently, because of the design limitations of our trusty Meheen bottling line, we were locked in to this reusable heavyweight. Now, having recently invested in a new filler to replace the Meheen, we have a great deal more flexibility with the bottles we can fill. Over the coming weeks you’re going to notice a slight difference in Kinnegar’s bottles as we transition from the old to the new model.
Our new “one-way” bottle weighs in at a sleek 265g, meaning that 105g less glass goes straight to recycling every time you enjoy one of our bottled beers. Although it looks very similar to our old bottle, you’ll notice that the form is in fact very slightly different. The bottle mould is adjusted in several aspects to maintain the same general look and feel while achieving structural integrity with little more than 70% of the material.
Reducing the amount of glass is just one side of the story. There’s a second sustainable upside to this new bottle — freight. We use approximately one container-load of bottles every month. Because of the reduction in weight, we can now fit almost 10% more bottles onto the lorry. And once we’ve filled them with beer, we can fit close to 20% more cases of bottles onto the pallets that we send out to our distributors in Dublin and Belfast.
Long story short, we can now bring a lot more bottled beer to your fridge with a smaller carbon footprint. We’re delighted to achieve this improvement in sustainability, although there’ll always be a special place in our heart for the sturdy “Mehrweg Flasche” that has served us so well for more than a decade!
