While bouncing around the interwebs trying to hunt down some information on Munster Alts, I somehow ended up on the Beer News page of Bayern’s website, where I found the following:
Reduce, Reuse and Recycle
Bayern Brewing is now the first Montana brewery to reuse and/or recycle its entire bottle packaging. For over a year, Bayern has been buying back our 6-pack carriers in good (reusable) condition in our tasting room for 10¢ cash or 15¢ for trade-in value for beer or merchandise. Now, with an aim to keep even more of our packaging out of the landfill, Bayern is also recycling ONLY OUR glass bottles. Help us in our attempts to “go green” by bringing all your Bayern bottle packaging to the brewery tasting room, located at 1507 Montana Street in Missoula.
In addition to bottles and carriers, Bayern also accepts their bottle caps, thus making their 6-packs entirely recyclable at the brewery.
Bayern explains their efforts further in the Special Recycling Edition of their Brewsletter. If you read the full article, you will notice that they don’t actually reuse the bottles they collect, stating that ”reusing bottles is a risky practice best left to homebrews.” Instead, collected bottles are picked up from the brewery by a recycler and send to Butte for crushing.
Still, offering free drop-off in a state with no bottle deposit, nor the associated incentive to recycle, is commendable. And the carrier buy-back is a practice I have not heard of before and one I’m surprised none of our environment lovin’ Northwest breweries have picked up on (Damn, almost made it through a post without ending a sentence in a preposistion).
Anyway, cheers to Bayern on their recycling/resue efforts!
Kevin