(Grand Rapids, MI) – When perusing the Brewery Vivant site, I came across a brief rebuttal of sorts to Tony Magee’s post about why Lagunitas will never use cans. A snippet from last month’s post…

—

Through my years of experience doing life cycle assessments, I know that virgin aluminum is more toxic and requires more energy to produce than glass. Luckily recycled aluminum has a much lower impact than virgin and our cans typically contain 68% recycled content. For this and all of the other reasons that we have in the sustainability section on this website (aluminum is more often recycled, the economic value of recycling aluminum subsidizes the recycling costs of all other materials, cans have more recycled content in them than glass bottles, cans protect beer from light, etc.), plus the fact that Michigan is a high recreation state where unbreakable is desirable, and the fact that the canning line we purchased requires less manpower to operate than a bottling line, we chose cans over bottles and it was the right choice for our brewery and one I am satisfied with.

via Brewery Vivant.