American Craft Beer The Best Craft Beer, Breweries, Bars, Brewpubs, Beer Stores, And Restaurants Serving Serious Beer.
(Photo by Jeremy Bezanger / Unsplash)
AB InBev, home to popular beer brands such as Budweiser, Stella Artois, Corona, Beck’s, and Leffe has managed to reduce the weight of its standard longneck beer bottle from 180 to 150 grams, a packaging innovation that cuts CO2 emissions by 17% per bottle.
“Light weighting our bottles has been a priority for many years at AB InBev and this new, lighter bottle is an important environmental and technological breakthrough, allowing us to decrease the carbon footprint of the glass bottle,” said Frederik De Graaf, global director of packaging technology development at AB InBev.
“This success is the fruit of intensive collaboration with our external glass partners, having shared knowledge and worked together on new glass coatings, new glass mold coatings, and state of the art converting to strengthen the glass.”
With bottles making up around 50% of its product carbon product footprint, AB InBev argues that using these new lightweight longneck bottles would be the equivalent to taking 62,000 cars off the roads in terms of annual CO2 emissions.
But according to Packaging Europe this development was not without challenges….
“Quality and safety are non-negotiable and all new packaging innovations undergo extensive testing before they can be released to the market,” De Graaf said.
“When reducing the weight of the bottle, we were faced with strength challenges – beer is, of course, a carbonated drink and inside pressure can build up due to the gas expanding under certain heat conditions.”
“We also needed to be mindful of the speed of our filling lines inducing high impact forces on the bottles. Ultimately, a combination of state-of-the-art equipment, skilled operators, and process improvements helped us to achieve this innovation.”
Anheuser-Busch InBev, which has committed to achieving a 25% corporate reduction in CO2 emissions by 2025, plans to roll out the new bottle, in Europe initially.
###
We can get snarky about the big beer conglomerates. So it’s only fair that we applaud companies like Anheuser-Busch when they adopt sustainability strategies that could make for a better world!
And here’s some more of what the world’s largest brewing company has been doing…
ANHEUSER-BUSCH COMMITS TO SUSTAINABLE RICE PRODUCTION
ANHEUSER-BUSCH COMMITS TO A ZERO EMISSION TRUCK FLEET BY 2025
ANHEUSER-BUSCH US BEERS NOW BREWED WITH 100% WIND AND SOLAR POWER
