Q: What’s better than closing the manufacturing loop?
A: Extending the life of a product before it’s recycled.
In the US and many European countries, we have become accustomed to drinking beverages out of single use containers and throwing the containers away. But it wasn’t that long ago that this practice was unheard of. 50 years ago, you could get milk delivered to your doorstep in a crate holding glass bottles. When you were done with the bottle you put the empty bottle back in the crate on the doorstep to be replaced with bottles full of fresh milk on the next delivery. In South America and other places, large beverage producers like Coca-Cola still use refillable bottles for distribution.
Microbreweries have long been associated with the reusable container. Beer has been sold in “growlers” for centuries and many breweries offer some version of bottles customers can bring in and get filled. But the use of refillable bottles that a beverage producer can collect, wash, and redistribute for sale had been abandoned for decades. But a few pioneers from bespoke breweries, like Double Mountain Brewery in Hood River, OR, have been responsible for reviving the refillable bottle on a much larger scale.
Double Mountain founder Matt Swihart started using refillable bottles in 2012, when nobody was doing it. He purchased refillable bottles from a Canadian bottle manufacturer, where refillables make up around 35% of the total beer sold and close to 100% of the refillable bottles are returned. (source)
Initially, the results were mixed; he recovered less than 25% of the bottles, but still, he persevered and over the next six years, several other Oregon breweries started using refillable bottles in their communities.
In 2018, the refillable bottle movement in Oregon got a huge boost of support from the statewide non-profit Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative (OBRC), which operates the bottle return program for the whole state. OBRC introduced a refillable bottle program for any brewery in Oregon that wanted to sell their beer in refillable bottles. The collective owns the bottles and leases them to breweries. The collective’s Bottle Drop program operates the collection, sorting, and washing of the bottles for any brewery in the program. Currently, there are 11 beer and wine producers in the refillable program.
The reemergence of refillable bottles has interesting implications for the future of reclaimable resources. It illustrates the challenges of operating in a system that may not have resources in place to incentivize recapturing products and materials at the end of their use cycle.
Without the infrastructure available to support the recovery and processing of refillable bottles, individual actors, like Matt’s Double Mountain Brewery, must absorb an outsized balance of the cost of the program. Not until the costs can be shared by a larger community of producers, such as the OBRC, can such a system make sense economically.
Other programs like the Bayern Brewery’s Eco League, a collection of beverage producers using refillable bottles processed at Bayern’s brewery in Missoula, MT, offer the benefits of sharing the cost across a community of producers.
The alternative is to incentivize consumers of these locally made products to act in the best interests of the local producer, thus sharing the burden of costs, but also localizing the rewards. Enlisting the support of the community of local consumers in the collection and return of refillable bottles is a grass-roots approach to the need for infrastructure to support closed loop and extended loop economies.
Our goal at 7evr is to provide a means to engage local communities in the development of closed and extended loop commerce. We believe that incentivizing the community can provide a means to support recycling and material recovery at a local level, by sharing the cost with producers to the point that it makes sound economic sense to reclaim goods and materials rather than put them in landfills.