If there’s a hoarded pile of empty two-fours in your basement doing nothing but collecting dust and smelling like must, listen up: the Oland Brewery needs you.
It’s not a complete crisis (“We’re not going to run out of beer,” assures Labatt Breweries of Canada’s Wade Keller) but the Oland bottle shortage is an interesting reminder of just how much the local brewery is recycling, and a great way of starting the cans versus bottles conversation. Yesterday, allNovaScotia and the Chronicle Herald reported that the folks at Oland were experiencing a major bottle shortage, to the point that they were asking suds-loving patrons to get their butts (and their empties) to the bottle depot, stat.
Keller says the brewery started noticing the shrinking reserve of bottles during the last month. While the holiday season is a reliably demanding time of year in the beer biz, such a shortage isn’t necessarily normal. You see, of the 10 million dozen bottles of beer to come out of the Agricola Street brewery annually, about 98 percent are returned from across the province and reused, on average, about 17 times. “Beer companies got in on the benefits of recycling early,” says Keller. “It’s obviously cost saving, which ultimately benefits the consumer.” All local brewers use the same, industry standard bottle so that no matter the label, they can be reused anywhere, and can borrow from each other if need be. In this case though, even Oland’s competitors couldn’t help it out, which is what forced an order of 11 truck loads of new bottles (each carrying up to 60,000 bottles each)—a foreign move for the brewery, especially at this time of year.
Sure, the hustle bustle of the holidays probably stops people from returning as frequently, and Keller points out that perhaps in preparation for entertaining shoppers are buying more than usual, but consuming it slower than they regularly would, but there’s another layer, too. “The other big factor for us is that the float of bottles is smaller than it used to be,” says Keller. “More consumers are choosing to buy cans, over the years we’ve not been buying as many bottles because of that.” He says in all likelihood the cans-over-bottles choice usually comes down to convenience: cans are lighter, smaller and easier to transport. But also, cans are shedding their bad rap. “At one time a stigma around cans,” says Keller. “Years ago you’d here people say they didn’t like the taste out of the can. I’d challenge people to taste the difference now.”
After you’ve finished frantically drinking from, and returning all of the bottles from your Christmas stash (only to help out dear Oland, right?), riddle me this: do you care whether your beer comes from aluminum or glass?
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2012.
Might help if there were more places you could return them and even better if you got the full deposit back like many other places. Here it is a deposit and basically another tax.
Matters not for me as dragging bottles around, either full or empty, without a vehicle is not an option these days. Too heavy to get more than 6 at a time to cart from the NSLC, and certainly could not be bothered hauling a dozen empties at a time for miles to a bottle return location.
A person should be able to return them to the NSLC for a refund, well the partial ‘refund’.
What few brews I get now are in a can, and those are easy enough to store until I get a good load to drop off at a return spot, when a vehicle is available. Or I put them out for the folks with the carts, who comb through the hood.
Debacle – a complete collapse or failure.
Bit of an overblown headline don’t ya think?
i have to drive from spyfield to goodwood to get rid of my empties, such a hassle. thank god for growlers
Can you return pop bottles at Superstore? No. There is a whole system built for the bottle return function in this province. That is why you only get part of the deposit back, to pay them for that.
If you ever saw the crap that comes out of the breweries’ bottle washers you would never touch a reused beer bottle again. I only buy cans or micros (that use new bottles) now.