Beer In Ads #3044: Uncle Sam Wants Your Cans

July 4, 2019 By Jay Brooks

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Thursday’s 4th of July ad is for Miller High Life, from 1974. From the late 1800s until the 1960s, poster art really came into its own, and in Europe a lot of really cool posters, many of them for breweries, were produced. But because today is American Independence Day, I thought I should share an ad from an American brewery. This poster was made for Miller Brewing Co., and the image of Uncle Sam holding a can High Life is just a detail from a poster created to promote recycling of their beer cans at the height of the Ecology movement in the 1970s. But the image is pretty cool, although I haven’t been able to figure out who the artist was that made it.

Below is most of the entire poster, from an old eBay listing and it appears they were focusing on three months at the end of 1974, September through November, with dates when they wanted people to “Join the Miller Pick-Em Up” campaign, presumably to stop littering, at least of their beer cans.

Recycling Beer Cans

June 20, 2011 By Jay Brooks

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Recycle Now, the organization putting on Recycle Week, which begins today, also has a very cool little animated video showing the process that beer cans go through during the recycling process.

Cans – how they are recycled from RecycleNow on Vimeo.

Recycling Beer Bottles

June 20, 2011 By Jay Brooks

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Recycle Now, the organization putting on Recycle Week, which begins today, has a very cool little animated video showing the process that beer bottles go through during the recycling process.

Glass Bottles – how they are recycled from RecycleNow on Vimeo.

Yuengling Phasing Out Returnables

August 25, 2010 By Jay Brooks

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I wrote about this last week, where the focus was on the Straub Brewery, in The Extinction Of Returnable Beer Bottles, but they did mention the decision by Yuengling to discontinue offering returnable bottles. Today my old hometown newspaper growing up, the Reading Eagle, picked up the story but centered instead on Yuengling. In Returnable Bottles Leave Beer Drinkers Cold, Dick Yuengling explains the reasons for discontinuing returnables.

Yuengling said returnable bottles still make great sense ecologically. He said that at one point 60 percent of his business was in returnable bottles.

“Now, if you showed a 16-ounce returnable bottle to a 22-year-old, he wouldn’t know what the heck it was,” Yuengling joked. “I like the idea. I installed a bottle washer at our new (Pottsville) location. I was going to try to revive the returnables but the customer just doesn’t want them anymore.”

According to the Beer Institute, in 1981 about 12% of beer sold was in returnable bottles. Today it’s just under 0.3% … and dropping fast. As I opined last week, even though I understand the rationale for this, I still can’t help but lament it. It just feels like a lost opportunity in our current obsession with being green. I did a lengthy feature article for All About Beer magazine a few years ago about brewery’s green practices, and I was astounded by how much most breweries, both big and small, were doing.

It seems like going back to returnables, while undoubtedly difficult and expensive, would be a great way to keep local beer local and show the craft beer industry’s leadership in recycling and being ecological. It may be nearly impossible to ramp up by any national company, but the smaller the brewery, the more manageable it could be, giving an advantage to local brewers. Oh, well, I know it’s not going to happen, but I can still dream.

The Extinction Of Returnable Beer Bottles

August 18, 2010 By Jay Brooks

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You know you’re old and curmudgeonly when you remember fondly returnable beer and soda bottles. They had a heft to them, felt heavier in your hand or carrying them to the car. That’s because they were made to last, to be used over and over again. I hadn’t really thought about it until this morning, but that was real recycling, well before the term had even been coined. But it was just practical to make things that could be re-used. It’s almost a cruel joke that as a society we’re so obsessed lately with recycling when without realizing it we were doing far more of it years ago before almost all packaging, including bottles and cans, became throwaways. If we really cared more about the environment and the world than our own selfish “convenience” then it would be easy to just return to … well, returnables.

Unfortunately, I’d say it would be almost impossible to change our collective habits at this point (yes, I’m a pessimist as well as a curmudgeon) despite the fact that many places around the world never stopped using returnable bottles. Germany is a prime example of this. All the beer bottles sold there are returnables and every brewery has huge stacks of cartons filled with bottles waiting to be cleaned and reused. Obviously, their economy hasn’t suffered and people haven’t decided to stop drinking beer because they might have to return the bottles rather than just throw them away. But I just can’t see that happening here where everything is about being fast and convenient, where it’s all about “instant” gratification. Lest you accuse me of being too self-righteous, I include myself among the lazy multitudes.

I bring this up because the Lehigh Valley [Pennsylvania] Morning Call has an interesting article about their local beer, Straub Brewery, and how Returnable beer bottles to become extinct if Straub doesn’t get back some cases. It’s not surprising that Straub is one of only two breweries who are still using returnable beer bottles — the other being Yuengling — and that both are in Pennsylvania, since the Commonwealth is the lone remaining (as far as I know) case state, meaning almost all beer is sold by the case at what are called “beer distributors.” This may have made sense in 1933, but it’s become an increasingly antiquated system as the years have rolled on.

From the article:

Straub Brewery, a 138-year-old family-owned business about 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, is begging customers mostly in Pennsylvania but also some in Ohio, New York and Virginia to return thousands of empty cases.

Without them, Straub says it will do as nearly every brewer has done over the years — eliminate returnable bottles from its inventory. Only one other major brewer and the nation’s oldest , D.G. Yuengling & Sons of Pottsville, still sells beer in returnable bottles. But it plans to phase out the practice by fall.

All major brewers, including Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors, gave up on returnable bottles years ago because their costs multiplied with national distribution. About 12 percent of all U.S. beer was sold in returnable bottles in 1981, but since 2007 the percentage has been negligible, according to the Beer Institute in Washington, D.C. In Pennsylvania, more than a quarter of all beer was sold in returnable bottles in 1981, but that was when state liquor control laws required most beers to be sold by the case through distributors which readily accepted the returns.

So hopefully their customers will heed the call and start returning their bottles so they can be used again. I know it’s a forgone conclusion that returnable bottles will die out at some point, but the nostalgic, romantic in me (a.k.a. old man) still thinks that the returnable is an idea that should be revisited, especially with the recent increased focus on being green. It would be hard to argue that reusing bottles and packaging wouldn’t ultimately be better for the environment than our current recycling efforts. But I think Dick Yuengling summed up the situation best.

“The consumer’s been indoctrinated; we’re a throwaway society,” Yuengling 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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Rethinking The Can

May 5, 2010 By Jay Brooks

John Heylin, who runs the Nor Cal Beer Guide, has an interesting article he posted today about the untold costs of aluminum cans, entitled Why Craft Breweries Should Stop Using Cans. In it, his main argument is that while cans have benefits once they’re made, that the process of creating aluminum cans have significant costs to the environment from the mining and processing of them. I hadn’t ever thought about it from that angle, and it’s certainly worth looking into further. He concludes with this.

The bottom line is this: aluminum is in no way environmentally friendly. Sure, after it is ripped from the Earth, smelted, shipped, refined, and made into a product it is easily recyclable and very light weight, but the cost is far too great. The cost to the environment and to the people living around these areas is just too much. Clean aluminum is like the myth of clean coal, it’s a total lie.

So what about glass? Heylin remarks that “at least glass comes from sand, is reusable, and when thrown away goes back to sand. Aluminum? It lasts forever.” I’m assuming, though, that taking sand and turning it into glass also has environmental costs associated with it, though what they are I don’t know off the top of my head.

In the end, I really don’t know how to balance which does the greater harm or is gentler on the planet. It seems no matter what we choose, some harm is done. I’m certainly not willing to give up packaged beer while so many other manufactured goods, and for that matter entire industries, are doing far worse damage. I guess today I’ll stick with draft beer. But wait, isn’t that one big aluminum can? Damn. Okay, I guess I’ll search out a wooden cask. Hold up, isn’t that chopping down forests for the wood? In the Joe Jackson song Cancer, a line in the chorus is “everything gives you cancer” and at one point in the song just after singing that line, a piano riff begins and Jackson yells out, “hey, don’t play that piano.” And in a sense, I guess my point is, like the song, that everything causes some harm and choices have to be made. Every brewery is built with mined metal, industrial processing plants, smelting, iron and steel, and goodness knows what else.

Should we try to make responsible choices? Of course. But in a world where every decision has consequences, and usually bad ones, even Thomas Hobson might have trouble making a choice.

Still, it’s always good to consider and rethink our assumptions on a regular basis. Any day that makes us think is a good day, in my opinion, at least, even if it’s driving me to drink.

Beer Bottles Galore Recycled Art

May 31, 2009 By Jay Brooks

Last weekend, the family and I spent the holidays in northern California, near Gualala. As we’re inveterate art nuts, we couldn’t resist the Fine Arts Fair that was taking place at the Gualala Art Center. We found a cool black walnut bowl to compliment the Kauri bowl we picked up last year in New Zealand. Alice made a beaded necklace and we generally had a nice time looking at art among the redwoods. But perhaps the most interesting thing we stumbled upon was the “Bottles Galore” recycled art of Pamela Wheatley, who makes “usable objects from beer, wine and fruit juice bottles.”

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The main display showing her candle holders and drinking glasses made from recycled beer bottles.

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Candle holders from brown bottles with cork bottoms.

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A design for tapered candles using green glass. The middle was cut out, and the bottom and top sections glued back together.

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Glass tumblers and tea light candle holders (I bought a pair of them in brown).

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And a tall vase using a 22 oz. beer bottle (I bought one of these, too.) They’re very inexpensive and when I remarked about that as I was paying for my purchases, Ms. Wheatley remarked that she was “just selling fun.” What a great attitude. She told us that she only uses bottles she finds or that friends give her, which she says happens more and more once they see what she’s doing with them. She lives in Manchester, California, which is a little farther north from Gualala along the Pacific coast but still about 40 miles south of Fort Bragg, where North Coast Brewing is located. She doesn’t seem to have a website, but if you want to know where she’ll be selling her wares, you could probably ask her via e-mail, which is pam4mom (@) hotmail (.) com.