How much does bottling cost?

Factual Questions
21

I have two recycling bins, one mixed for paper,and one for bottles cans etc. When I was younger taking those empties to the bottle depot every couple of months was well worth it. A garbage bag of bottles is worth about $15-20, so its not insignificant. Now I just put the bag out in the alley for bottle pickers. They tend to be older people, I assume on fixed incomes. It is sad to see, but it is one less chore for me and they obviously need the money more than I do.

The thing is with deposits even if you toss that bottle there is a strong incentive for someone to pick it up. I am pretty sure glass bottles are no longer ever reused due to the possibility of glass fragments in older bottles among other things. Glass can be separated by colour and melted down for reuse. Aluminum cans are perfectly recyclable and and at a huge energy saving over refining. Paper and plastic I doubt are often truly recycled but at least they are separated this way and kept out of the ditches, rivers and landfills.

I don’t notice more litter when I am down in the US so I guess voluntary recycling works, but deposits seem like a painless exercise. Even if it just goes in the bin it still is available to the municipality to supplement the cost of collection.

22

Assorted stuff about glass bottles, because it is very rare that anyone might care about this stuff I carry around in my head:

At a previous job I worked on the control systems for machines that make glass bottles. The customer was the largest manufacturer of glass bottles in the US, and nos. 2,3,&4 purchased the machines from them.

Glass bottle making is an extremely low margin business. 2% was the figure thrown out when we started trying to improve the machines. The raw material is sand, and recycled glass, which are both virtually free. There was mention upthread of recycled glass being used for non-food use, which is not correct. Melting glass requires extreme temperature, and any impurities are going to get cooked out. Also consider that the alternative to recycled glass is sand which is full of dirt and germs, only so much of which will be washed out when it is cleaned. So food jars get recycled glass just like everything else. Any rejected bottles go back into the melt…not so much to save money on the cost of raw material, as to avoid the cost of hauling them away.

One example of how optimized the business is: The cardboard boxes and six pack carriers go to the glass bottle factory, and are used to pack the empty bottles in for shipment to the bottler…they have to be packed in something to avoid breakage, and no point in creating two sets of packaging.

Anyway, since there is virtually no cost associated with the raw material, the cost of the bottles is plant and machinery capitalization, labor, and fuel. Our goal was to improve the output of the machines by 2-4% which was expected to make them 2-3X more profitable to operate. (recall existing profit margin was 2%)

Brown glass is popular for beer bottles mostly because it is easiest to make. Nobody cares the particular shade of brown. Green glass is a little harder, but it carries some cachet, so it persists. Clear glass is the hardest…scrap glass has to be sorted, and only snow white sand can be used. Baby-food jars have the highest reject rate because moms don’t want to see a single dark fleck in that jar.

The manufacturing of bottles is so efficient, that inspecting and washing returns costs more than making new bottles. Also twist off caps are now a consumer expectation, and the threads do not reliably last more than one capping. Non-refillable bottles can be made thinner and cheaper, and lighter/smaller, so cheaper to ship.

Sorry, I never knew exact numbers on the cost, and it has been almost 20yrs. since I left that job, so anything I knew would be dated anyway.

23

Well there’s always the Michigan scam.

A nickel is all that’s needed. The deposit encourages recycling and gets people to pick up the bottles and can litter. I don’t know how the deposits collected have to be handled, but in some way it’s a revenue boon for the retailers who won’t have to pay out anywhere near the amount in deposits that it takes in. My little state doesn’t have deposits but they don’t do a special run of Rhode Island bottle and can labels so they can be taken over to Mass and turned in at recycling centers. Every restaurant and bar will be visited by someone to take away the returnables, and you don’t see bottles and cans all around roads the way you used to before the deposits started up again after the decline of re-usable glass bottles.

24

Kevbo - Very informative post. I learned a lot from it. But one correction/addition: brown bottles are popular not so much for the costs as for the protection from UV light brown affords beer. Clear bottles leads to skunking, which is bad unless you like the taste of Corona. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m sure bottlers and brewers are both glad brown bottles are cheaper to make. It means both of them can profit from a requirement.

25

Beer should come in cans. The cans can be recycled profitably and the cans keep out UV light. Glass bottle get recycled only because of subsidies. Many communities cannot find anyone to take the glass collected in curbside recycling so it just gets expensively sorted collected and then put in landfill because no one wants the glass.

26

Nice, but untrue. The bottling companies in New York resisted bottle deposits for ages, and even came up with their own cockamamie plan to hire people to pick up all litter instead of forcing them to deal with recycling bottles.

Remember – the glass bottle was rarely used when bottle deposits came back. Everything was plastic (with twist tops), “no deposit, no return.” Bottlers hadn’t dealt with empties for decades, so they didn’t have the infrastructure to handle returns, and certainly weren’t happy with having to keep money on hand to pay for returned bottles (some even refused to accept them, even though that was technically illegal).

27

Sure, but pretty much any colored glass blocks UV. If green were cheaper, it would be the default instead of brown glass.

Oh, and if you see a red glass bottle, know that no expense is being spared. You make glass red by adding gold.

28

Really interesting, Kevbo. Thanks for the info.
I have some Pyrex bowls that we’ve been using for years to store leftovers. The plastic lids had finally gone bad, and I was looking for replacements, but it was cheaper to buy new containers+lids than just lids. It seemed so wasteful to me to throw out the old glass bowls, but I throw out glass jars from various stuff all the time.

29

I disagree. It has been proven that brown blocks best. Green offers only second-rate protection.

30

That’s what I had heard, too. I’d heard the reason Heineken is found in green bottles (in the US) is because in postwar Europe, brown bottles were in short supply, so exports were shipped in green bottles (assuming local bottles would be reused). Brown is much superior in blocking the light that changes the alpha acids from the hops to 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, or skunky. Also known as the Heineken smell.

31

I’m absolutely convinced that if it was more profitable for breweries and soft drink bottlers to go the old pre-1980s route of reusable glass bottles with deposits, they would do so.

For some reason or another, they make more money overall by using disposable glass, plastic and aluminum containers than they did in the era of aluminum (and steel) cans and glass bottles.

I suspect that if there was some kind of recycling fee associated with the disposable containers, the bottlers and brewers might go back to the older method, but for the time being, they don’t pay any of the downstream costs of disposable bottles or recycling them (or not), so they go with those, rather than maintain the infrastructure to reuse existing glass bottles.

32

Forget glass, in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina you can buy Coke in reusable plastic containers. That’s not recycled; it’s heavier duty plastic bottles returned, cleaned, and refilled in the factory. In fact, in the late 90s reused plastic dominated as a more affordable option but now the thinner, non-reusable plastics are becoming more popular. I believe it’s due to people shopping more at WalMart type stores instead of smaller local stores. An added advantage of non-reusables is that consumers don’t have to worry about paying a deposit on the bottles or returning them after use.

33

So why is brown easiest to make? Because it doesn’t particularly matter if some bits of clear / green / whatever get mixed in?

I take it that idea that you have to rinse bottles so they’re nice and clean before recycling is a myth? (Beer and Pop bottles I’d throw directly in recycling, but something like a jelly jar that still had a lot of gunk in I’d throw into the trash figuring it might contaminate the recycling.)

Have there been any firm conclusions of “cans vs bottles”. Most of what I drink (Mexican Coke and regional beer- think Summit and Leinies) simply isn’t available in cans anyway. I don’t like the types of “beer”, Miller, Bud, etc, that come in cans.

34

Various factors are involved.

  1. It is better if bottles are clean before recycling. But not required. The temperature when melting the glass for recycling will destroy any germs, so no health problem. But burning up that excess (non-glass) material wastes some energy, thus making the recycling process very slightly less efficient.

  2. But this lost efficiency costs much less energy than throwing it away and having to haul that garbage to a landfill, and manufacturer a new glass container to replace it.

  3. However, in places like California, where there is currently a water shortage (and probably more places in the future), the water wasted in washing out these glass jars may do more to the environment – especially if you use hot water. (Assuming that that wash water goes down the drain, rather than being used to water your garden, etc. Washing them outside, with the garden hose, then recycling may be the best option).

35

If it were cheaper (including the cost of collecting, transporting and sanitizing the empties), they would be doing it already. That is the beauty of the free market. If one bottler could get an edge on a competitor by re-using bottles, he would. If they don’t, it is because the numbers don’t add up.

I suspect that back in the day, it was cheaper to re-use glass bottles. Modern manufacturing turned that upside down, and now it is cheaper to make a new bottle than to re-use an old one.

36

Fascinating stuff.
I grew up in Connecticut, and when I was a kid the state added a 5 cent deposit on soda bottles and cans.
But there was a local bottler (still is) who had been charging a deposit long before the state required it, and their deposit was 10 cents, not five. (And if you bought soda by the case, there was a $4 deposit on the case in addition to the $2.40 for the bottles.)

The reason for their deposit was: they wanted the bottles back.
The owner would go around to auctions when other bottles were closing down, and he’d buy their bottles. He said that new glass bottles were really expensive, in part because they weren’t making as many of them anymore as the major manufacturers switched to plastic, and so they needed to get their empties back to keep their cost down.

If I may take a second to plug them, Hosmer Mountain soda used to be available online, but apparently they’ve scaled back to home delivery in Eastern Connecticut. Soda in glass bottles, delivered in wooden boxes, just like when they started in 1912.