Reusing Bottles for Resale

[DualCoreBrewing]

I did a brief search on here, but couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, so here goes...

We are based out of Oregon which, along with no sales tax, makes you pay a 5 cent deposit on class and aluminum bottles.

In the interest of saving the planet and reducing our carbon footprint a bit, the idea was hatched that we could double the deposit rate to 10 cents per bottle, and then wash, store, and reuse the bottles. (Our program would only be for 22oz bottles, unbroken, without painted labels)

I know they do this kind of thing in the EU, but I don't know many breweries that do it in the US. Is there some kind of legal issue with buying back the bottles from the public, and then reusing them? Would we have to have a machine for inspecting the integrity of the bottle, or is a simple visual inspection sufficient?

Any input would be appreciated.

 

[number40fan]

Have you looked up the cost of buying a returned bottle from a facility that does the cleaning and inspection before they resale? Or does all of the returns go to a crushing/recycling center?

 

[Rivenin]

new zealand has breweries that do that,but hadn't heard of anyh in the USA

 

[DualCoreBrewing]

Have you looked up the cost of buying a returned bottle from a facility that does the cleaning and inspection before they resale? Or does all of the returns go to a crushing/recycling center?

I'm not sure. I haven't done the research to see if anyone offers clean used bottles. I assumed that all of the bottles were crushed and reformed. Our bottle return centers have self-serve machines that crush the bottles into a bin on-site, and then the recyclers just come and pick up the bins full of glass chunks.

 

[number40fan]

There would only be a couple of things I would be worried about. Some kind of infection/disease contaminating your cleaning solution as well as the other bottles and a broken bottle getting past inspection and into the customers hands.

 

[DualCoreBrewing]

There would only be a couple of things I would be worried about. Some kind of infection/disease contaminating your cleaning solution as well as the other bottles and a broken bottle getting past inspection and into the customers hands.

Those were a few of my concerns as well. The idea was to run them through a high heat, high pressure wash, rinse bath, StarSan sanitizer bath, low pressure heat dry, and then box and store. Inspection of structural integrity wouldn't take place until bottling, and we were just going to place a bottle above a high output lamp and look for cracks.

Thoughts on the process?

 

[IslandLizard]

I was born in Europe (Netherlands) in 1956 and lived there for 30 years. All glass bottles were returnables with a deposit. After an event you could make a small fortune gathering and returning them.

Commercial beer bottles (e.g., Heineken, Amstel, Grolsch) were cleaned, inspected, and refilled. Around 1980 the glass disposables were introduced, mostly by 2nd tier beer brands. They were thinner and a different shape. All of those were slated for recycling. I don't know the current situation there, but when I left for the U.S. in 1986, returnables were still pretty much the fashion there. Then they did not have 2 or 3 liter plastic coke bottles yet. All those were glass, 300ml, 500ml, and 1 liter mostly. Some water was sold in plastic bottles, all around Europe.

Someone who was involved in the cleaning and inspection of those glass returnables there should be able to help you with the process and what was involved. From what I heard, there was a pre-inspection before cleaning and any bottles with solid debris in them, such as cigarette butts, or visible damage, were recycled.

 

[day_trippr]

^That goes along with what I was thinking: it's likely cheaper to manufacture beer bottles for one-time-use than to make them sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of shipping out and back (plus the end-user treatment) with a low enough damage rate in the returns to be worthwhile...

Cheers!

 

[IslandLizard]

^That goes along with what I was thinking: it's likely cheaper to manufacture beer bottles for one-time-use than to make them sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of shipping out and back (plus the end-user treatment) with a low enough damage rate in the returns to be worthwhile...

Cheers!

It's still strange to me how recycling is economically more feasible than reuse. I guess economies of scale are at work. Plus reusing requires shipping empties back to the bottling plants and tons of sorting and handling. It must take an awful amount of water and other resources to clean them since so many consumers are sheer pigs and inconsiderate. A simple wash and rinse after use, like most of us home brewers do, could save lots of resources later. There's really no need to put motor oil or disgusting things in them and return them.

All beer bottles were in plastic crates in 20's (450 or 500ml) or 24's (300ml). There was a decent deposit on the crates too, if you took them out of the store (~$5.00)

 

[Bobbybob]

I had the same idea my self. I was thinking of setting up a homebrew bottle exchange. I now have about 400 bottles in my basement, I just have to keg then bottle the beer.

 

[ChuckO]

Returnable/reusable bottles were the norm for beer, soft drinks and milk until the late 1950's as far as I can recall. I have 3 or 4 cases of reusable beer bottles from the 1970's, so they were used regularly. The reusable bottles are considerably thicker and weigh much more, increasing shipping costs. The shipping cost worked both ways, from the bottling plant to the wholesaler to the retailer and back again. Add that to the cost of cleaning and inspecting the bottles and tracking refunds through the supply chain and you probably have more cost than buying new lighter weight bottles.

Bottle deposits mandated by law don't have to have any basis in economics, the consumer will be stuck with the bill whether he wants it or not. In areas of the country near glass plants there is no problem. Get out into an area where there is no use for recycled glass and quite often you find that there are no recycling projects that do more than gather recyclables to meet legal requirements and then truck things to the dump.

 

[IslandLizard]

Yuengling Breweries (Pottsville, PA) still ships their Chesterfield Ale in heavy brown returnable bottles in a fiberboard crate. All other beers are kegged, canned and/or bottled in (mostly green glass) recyclables.

I think instructions on the returnables are still being printed on the box, and include a rinse out after use.

 

[DualCoreBrewing]

I'm no scientist, nor am I an economist, so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me...

Yuengling Breweries (Pottsville, PA) still ships their Chesterfield Ale in heavy brown returnable bottles in a fiberboard crate. All other beers are kegged, canned and/or bottled in (mostly green glass) recyclables.

IslandLizard, thanks for the information. I tried to find something on their site about it, but couldn't. I'll dig a bit deeper.

Maybe more of a management/strategy question than a bottling question, but my idea now is: If I limited my distribution area to Oregon through my brewpub and small bottle shops, and continued to offer a $0.10 "bounty" on 22oz bottles (dropped off at my brewpub), what kind of liability would I have reusing the glass? Is best efforts sufficient? (I suppose this is what liability insurance is for).

For the time being, it looks like I'm going to just suck it up and pay $1.00 per 22oz bottle from my LHBS (I don't drink enough to replenish my stock, and I give away a fair number of bottles). Production and storage space doesn't yet dictate this, but maybe some day soon I'll need to.

If anyone (or a few anyones) in the Beaverton Oregon area wants to split a pallet of bottles, let me know.

 

[IslandLizard]

A few months ago someone from Northern VA was selling cases of bombers from a large palletted shipment. Price was much better than $1 per, IIRC.

If your bounty bottles are fairly clean, a visual inspection, good hot wash and scrub with PBW, rinsed well and Starsanned should bring them back to distribution ready standard. Someone here claimed "making" over $30 an hour just doing that, cleaning bottles. If you have a large volume of bottles, a washing station with heater, pump and filter can be build for as little as $100.

 

[DualCoreBrewing]

Someone here claimed "making" over $30 an hour just doing that, cleaning bottles.

That's kind of what my math showed, too. If I paid double the deposit for dirty bottles ($0.10/ea), and paid a dude $15/hr to clean them, assuming he could clean 40/hour, my cost for 120 bottles is $57 plus cleaning supplies. The hardware would be accounted for as machinery and amortized accordingly, so that's out of the equation. The water used would likely come from the HLT, so that's already accounted for... That's a $63 savings. Plus I'm sure it's more environmentally safe (or could be, given the process).