Bill Coors: We Invented Recycling

In 1959, Bill Coors' engineers revealed the seamless, recyclable aluminum can, launching a revolution in the beverage industry and planting a seed of environmentalism in the American mindset (www.mnn.com/food/beverages/sponsorstory/bill-coors-we-invented-recycling).

Earth Day is an annual event, celebrated on April 22, on which day events worldwide are held to demonstrate support for environmental protection. It was first celebrated in 1970, and is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network, and celebrated in more than 192 countries each year.
In 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco, peace activist John McConnell proposed a day to honor the Earth and the concept of peace, to first be celebrated on March 21, 1970, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. This day of nature's equipoise was later sanctioned in a Proclamation written by McConnell and signed by Secretary General U Thant at the United Nations. A month later a separate Earth Day was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in first held on April 22, 1970. Nelson was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award in recognition of his work.[3] While this April 22 Earth Day was focused on the United States, an organization launched by Denis Hayes, who was the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Day).

Nu is dit geen milieublog, maar een bierblog en laat er dus toevallig een bierbrouwerij zijn die al vroeg aan recycling deed:


The lightweight two-piece containers were first used commercially by Coors to pack beer on 22 January 1959 at its brewery in Colorado.
It was the result of work through the 1950s by Bill Coors – later to become chairman and president of the family-managed brewer Adolph Coors Co – who wanted a replacement for the tinplate drinks cans he saw being littered around the US.
Coors spurred a market expansion that would result in 100 billion aluminium drinks cans being sold every year in the US, and almost 200 billion worldwide.
The first aluminium cans were small – 7oz – a size that was dictated by available technology, but they were popular in the Denver test market amongst women who thought that aluminium would keep the beer cool longer.
“The steel can was not a good container for beer,” said Bill Coors when he talked to The Canmaker in 1999. “All metal cans have to be lined and the linings in those days were not perfect, so the beer picked up tin and iron from the can which affected both its taste and its clarity. “But the main reason was that the tin can which came on the markets in the 1930s was the first disposable container for beer and carbonated beverages. Before this everything had been in returnable bottles.
“People took advantage of this disposable factor and started throwing them all over the landscape and the green people started legislating to ‘ban the can’.
“Recycling the tin can was out of the question. One of the advantages we saw of the aluminium can was that it had intrinsic value in the used can itself that more than justified the effort and cost of recycling.” Bill Coors, now 93, is still a technical advisor to the brewer.
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The Coors cans were made from pure aluminium slugs using an impact extrusion manufacturing process. This was later replaced by the draw and wall-iron (DWI) process, which had been under development by Jakob Keller in Switzerland, who first patented it in 1944, and Ed Maeder who joined Keller at Alcan in the UK.
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Maeder, who would later set up canmaking plants for Anheuser-Busch and run his own canmaking operations in Mexico, said that David Reynolds was instrumental in the success of the aluminium drinks can but he paid tribute to others, notably Bill Coors, now 93 and still a technical advisor to the brewery.
“There were other critical players,” said Maeder. “If they had not done their thing, at their time, there may not have been an aluminium can either.”
At Coors, the production of aluminium cans at the Colorado brewery expanded with recycling operations and an aluminium rolling mill, and Bill Coors maintained a watching brief on the DWI developments. “As soon as we became aware of the DWI process, we switched,” he said. “It was far more cost effective than impact extrusion that had to use pure aluminium. DWI used half the amount and gave much thinner can walls.” Indeed: the first 7oz cans weighed the same as 16oz DWI cans.
Meanwhile, the leading canmakers and their steel suppliers had been viewing the threat to their business and developed new steel can manufacturing techniques. According to Beth Mende Conny, who wrote about the Coors aluminium can project in ‘A Catalyst for Change’, these moves only delayed the inevitable. “With the money brewers saved, they went into self manufacturing. And when they did they manufactured aluminium cans,” she said.
Coors set up its own DWI can lines after buying the Kaiser equipment and and its first 7oz cans were made on Thanksgiving Day in 1965, followed ten months later by 11oz cans. Soon other manufacturers and brewers, finding that the canmakers still resisted moving from tinplate cans, bought the technology from Coors. Later canmakers such as Continental Can (now part of Crown) and American Can (part of Rexam) took up the DWI technology.
As Coors began reducing the volumes of tinplate cans bought in, it supported a small canmaker, Jeffco Manufacturing, with help to get started with the making of aluminium DWI cans. Such was the rate of expansion that Jeffco sold cans to other customers and built plants for other brewers. In 1969 it was bought by Ball Brothers, now as Ball Corporation the biggest beverage canmaker in the US.
Coors, founded in 1873 by Bill Coors’ grandfather and now part of Molson Coors, packed its last tinplate can in 1971. It would expand its plant at Golden to make it the biggest single can manufacturing operation of its kind in the world. At the same time the other DWI beverage can plants spawned by the brewers would be taken over by the ever-consolidating specialist canmakers.
All recognise that the development of the DWI can was inevitable, but its debut was advanced by the vision of Bill Coors half a century ago. “I believe that if the aluminium can had not been developed by somebody,” he said, “the metal container would have been legislated out of business.” (www.canmaker.com/news/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=806&catid=1:news&Itemid=57)

In the late 1950s, long before the creation of Earth Day and before the concept of recycling entered the public consciousness, the Colorado Rockies were sprinkled with tin cans. Almost all preserved foods and beverages were packaged this way, and folks out for a drive or a hike would just pitch the empties onto the side of the road to rust.
These cans bothered Bill Coors for many reasons. The litter spoiled the landscape surrounding the Adolph Coors Co. in Golden, the cans left an aftertaste in the beer they brewed, and the tin was heavy, expensive and inefficient as a packaging material. He set about finding a solution.
In 1959, his engineers revealed the seamless, recyclable aluminum can, launching a revolution in the beverage industry and planting a seed of environmentalism in the American mindset.
The Coors company began a program called Cash for Cans, offering one penny for each can (and glass bottle) returned for recycling. By 1966, Coors was honored by the Good Outdoor Manners Association for environmental stewardship, having collected over 13 million cans in the previous year. According to Time magazine, the company had a nearly 85 percent recovery rate (www.mnn.com/food/beverages/sponsorstory/bill-coors-we-invented-recycling).

This sustainability effort, dubbed “Working Together for a Better Environment,” only continued to improve while raising public awareness of reuse and recycle concepts. The Rocky Mountain News, in commemorating the 50-year anniversary of the can, noted that in 1990, MillerCoors became the first company to recycle more cans than it sold into the marketplace. Bill Coors famously said, “Waste is a resource out of place,” which inspired company leadership to unearth new ways to reduce material and energy usage.
Today, the company shreds plastic from its brewing barrels for use in garden and lawn applications. It sells leftover barley malt as animal feed to local farmers. The employees travel across the acres-wide facilities on tricycles. Recently, the company reduced the diameter of aluminum can ends and saved nearly 622 tons of aluminum.
“MillerCoors is committed to  environmental sustainability both inside our breweries and in the communities where our beer is marketed and sold,” said Kim Marotta, Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility for MillerCoors.  “We strive to be a responsible corporate citizen and believe that preserving resources for generations to come, just as Bill Coors did back in the 50’s, is key to growing our business the right way.” (www.mnn.com/food/beverages/sponsorstory/bill-coors-we-invented-recycling).

MillerCoors:
Our environmental sustainability strategy strives to reduce environmental impacts at every stage of the brewing process and focuses on three main areas:
Reducing water use in our manufacturing facilities and agricultural supply chain
Reducing our carbon footprint across our value chain
Eliminating waste at all major manufacturing facilities.
The key to our success has been how well our employees share best practices and work together as a team - not just in their breweries and operations but also across the organization. This approach has led to huge gains in water and energy efficiency while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and waste
...
Reducing Our Water Usage
We have worked extensively to increase water efficiency in our brewery operations by employing innovative monitoring and processing systems. In 2014, we achieved an average water-to-beer ratio of 3.36:1.0 across our eight major breweries, a 3.2 percent reduction compared with 2013. For comparison, some U.S. breweries use more than six barrels of water to produce a single barrel of beer. By 2020, we'll continue working to reduce our water-to-beer-ratio across all our direct operations to achieve an average ratio of 3.0:1.0.
...
Reduce Packaging by 2 Percent by Weight
Our 2015 goal was to reduce overall annual weight of all our packaging in the supply chain by 2 percent from the 2008 base year. Our calculation method considers the average weight of all packaging materials per barrel of beer. Through a combination of light-weighting initiatives and changes in product mix, we surpassed our goal two years early and reduced packaging weight by 8.74 percent.
Waste
We reuse or recycle nearly 100 percent of our brewery waste, including protein-rich residual brewer's grain and spent yeast, glass cullet, aluminum, plastic, wood and other materials. We turn waste into energy, compost and soil conditioner for our own use, and we send the remaining byproducts to companies that use them for other beneficial purposes.
In 2014, we sent 2.95 million pounds of waste to landfill and reduced waste sent to landfill by more than 896,000 pounds. Seven of our eight major breweries are now landfill-free, with the Milwaukee brewery achieving this status in December 2014 (www.millercoors.com/GBGR/Environmental-Stewardship.aspx).