Two tubs sit at Bayern Brewery full of empty glass bottles which will be recycled later this month. Bayern has teamed up with Glass is Greener, a local recycling business who transports the glass to a glass pulverizer in Butte. (Ali Vandergon/Montana Kaimin)

Bayern brewery starts recycling glass

by Carmen George | February 11, 2010 | Montana Kaimin

Glass recycling at Missoula’s Bayern Brewery began with a 10-year-old boy.

“My son was always bugging me about why we don’t recycle,” said Bayern’s brewmaster Thorsten Geuer.

Geuer said it was the environmentally conscious attitude of his son’s generation that led him to contact Glass is Greener, the only recycling business in town that accepts glass.
The brewery has been recycling its bottles and carriers since the start of the new year.

“We figured, let’s just do it,” Geuer said. “We wanted to get the whole thing going and maybe inspire other people.”

The brewery produces about 1,500 cases of beer a week. That’s 6,000 six-packs, or 36,000 bottles, of beer. Of that number, about half those bottles stay in Missoula every week, Geuer said.

So far, the brewery has collected about three large trash cans of bottles every week since mid-January, or about 200 six-packs of beer, Geuer said. For the past few years, the brewery has been reusing clean six-pack carriers returned to the business, he said.

The brewery is giving a 15-cent in-house credit or ten cents in change for each Bayern six-pack brought into its tasting room. If Bayern bottles and carriers are dropped off in the brewery’s parking lot or along the street, they won’t be accepted, Geuer said.

Glass is Greener founder Chip Powers picks up these bottles at Bayern every week. He also collects glass from 40 homes around town every month for a small fee. He takes the bottles to a glass pulverizer in Butte once a month where the glass is crushed into sand that can be reused for purposes like construction material.

“The long-term goal is to get a pulverizer in town and to get glass recycling in Missoula,” Powers said. “The key will be finding a place that will want to remake it into glass. That will be the biggest hurdle.”

Powers said glass recycling is often difficult to profit from because recycled glass sand is more expensive than natural sand used for construction, which is the largest market for recycled glass in Montana.

Geuer and Powers are talking about the potential for a pulverizer in Missoula that would grind glass into larger granules, using less energy and allowing the glass to be remade into bottles. Geuer said his brewery might also look into sanitizing used bottles if they can get enough people invested in the idea of recycling glass in Missoula.

Geuer said there are enough people and local breweries in the area to make glass recycling a cost-efficient practice in town if people buy into the idea.

But there’s another option if the glass bottles can’t be remade in Missoula. With the 12,000 six-packs of Bayern that stay in Missoula every month, Geuer thinks that the brewery’s beer bottles, and those of others, would eventually create enough glass that it could be shipped by train to a place that makes glass bottles in Portland.

John Sanden, director of marketing and sales for Missoula’s Bayern, has similar hopes for the future of glass recycling in Missoula and across Montana.

There are a little more than 20 breweries in Montana, Sanden said, making the state one of only three others in the United States that have as many breweries per million people.

Of these, Bayern is the only one he knows of that’s recycling its glass, he said.

“It’s kind of a stepping stone,” Sanden said. “Hopefully other people will join.”

For more information about recycling glass in Missoula, contact Glass is Greener at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or (406) 370-0949.

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