Sea life draws the shortest straw when it comes to plastic. Whether it’s a straw stuck in a sea turtle’s nose or six-pack ring wrapped around a bird’s neck, millions of marine animals consume plastic each year inflicting upon them everything from suffocation to starvation. By 2050, nearly every seabird will have consumed plastic.
While straws and plastic bags have been at the center of this wave of discourse, six-pack rings are another common enemy. Their circular design makes it easy for wildlife to get entangled. One brewery in Delray Beach, Florida, found an innovative way to play a leading role in solving this problem: a biodegradable, edible six-pack ring.
Saltwater Brewery was founded by surfers, fishermen and ocean-lovers. So the environment has always been at the core of their work, said Dustin Jeffers, the co-founder and head of operations.
Though the brewery’s core mission is to make good beer, they’re also concerned about humankind’s impact on the environment. Because they made public their commitment to protecting the ocean, the marketing firm We Believers approached the brewery to create an eco-friendly six-pack ring in 2016.
Seaweed was initially considered for the rings, but it had its limitations. Then a brewery founder considered wheat and barley, which are the waste byproducts of the brewing process.
“This is a full circle,” Jeffers told NationSwell. “It’s a byproduct that we always have, so instead of using another resource to make [the rings], we have all of this at our disposal.”
It worked. The six-pack ring quickly breaks down in water and can be consumed by wildlife. The rings were brought to the market in January 2018, and by the middle of the year, the rings, along with their beer, could be found across both the East to West Coasts.
In a compost pile, the rings quickly biodegrade. But if they make their way into the water stream, the rings wills break down in just a few months (compared to plastic rings, which can turn into microplastics that never degrade).
While the rings are edible, Jeffers noted that they don’t replace food for marine life. The rings hold no nutritional value, so the company advises customers to not intentionally throw the product in the ocean.
“The best way I can describe it is having your child eat a Sour Patch Kid rather than a Lego,” Gove said. “It’s not a part of their diet, but it is something that is better than alternative, so that’s something to keep in mind,” Saltwater Brewery President Chris Gove told Mashable.
“This innovative product is a better alternative, and safer to the environment than the currently used plastic rings,” Marta Gomez-Chiarri, a professor at the University of Rhode Island, told Kitchn. “Anything that is done to decrease the amount of plastics that we use is very important and well worth it.
Though Gomez-Chiarri praised the biodegradable rings, she cautioned that they contain the chemical PFAA, which, while not nearly as harmful to ocean life as plastics, can still be toxic to animals who ingest it.
Since the idea of the six-pack rings sparked in 2016, other companies have followed. Craft breweries in over 12 countries have adopted the rings. And now major beer companies are looking for similar solutions. This summer, MillerCoors announced its working with the tech firm Footprint to create a similar biodegradable six-pack ring.
“What we are trying to do is get away from the plastic and get more into the biodegradable, recyclable and bio-friendly solution,” MillerCoors brewmaster Jeff Nickel told Denver7.
In early 2019, competitor Corona tested biodegradable six-pack rings in Tulum, Mexico. And it recently announced a waste-free, interlocking can that stacks together.
“Are six-pack rings the worst thing in the ocean and causing the most problems? Of course not,” said Jeffers. “But it kind of gets people thinking about what else they can change.”
The next time you crack open a cold one, consider what you can do to make a change.
More: The World Has a Plastic Problem, and a Parachute Might Help Solve It
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On Tap at the Local Microbrewery: Economic Opportunity
Throwing one back may be the key to job growth in America.
Yes, really.
Between 2002 and 2013, the percentage of Americans who consumed alcoholic drinks grew by 8 percent to almost three-quarters of the population, according to a 2017 study in the journal JAMA. This increase has coincided with a surge of interest in craft beers and local liquors. To meet the demand, the number of jobs in the alcohol manufacturing sector have more than doubled in the past decade for breweries, alone.
Microbreweries, specifically, are something of a Cinderella story. Thirty years ago, less than 100 independently run breweries were in operation nationwide. By 2016, there were more than 5,000, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group that analyzes and represents independent U.S. breweries.
Likewise, production from independent brewers has increased — growing from 35,000 barrels in 1981 to more than 24 million barrels in 2016, according to the Brewers Association.
“I call the entire craft beer movement the 30-plus-year overnight success story,” says Julia Herz, craft beer program director for the Brewers Association. “But the reason is, first and foremost, we’re still a beer-loving nation.”
Actually, that’s just part of the (t)ale. Another prevailing theory is that Americans have become punch-drunk by fancy food and drink. Just like evolving tastes have fueled a surge of fast-casual eateries and pour over coffee places, our palates have become more refined when it comes to what we drink at our neighborhood watering hole as well.
Between 2006 and 2016, approximately 61,000 beverage manufacturing jobs (such as bottling, sales, etc) were created. Breweries accounted for almost 33,000 of those new positions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly a quarter of all beverage manufacturing jobs can be traced back to brewers.
In contrast, soft drink manufacturers — which hire a significant portion of beverage manufacturing workers — have reduced their workforce during the same time period by double digits.
Craft brewers use local, high quality ingredients and artisanal techniques to make their brews — meaning that manufacturing jobs must be created nearby and can’t be outsourced to a foreign manufacturer. In comparison, large-scale, commercial beermakers mass produce their lagers and IPAs in various manufacturing facilities using the most cost-effective methods and ingredients.
“Craft brew is very inefficient,” says Herz, explaining that the production of craft beer is more hands-on. “Because they’re so inefficient compared to big beer, they need more jobs to brew the beer.”
And it isn’t just beermakers that are getting fat off the proverbial hops. Small businesses are, too. Herz calls this the trickle-up effect, where, for example, craft-beer-only bars and retailers have opened near an existing microbrewery, creating even more jobs.
“The beer category over time has evolved. You have more beer towers at restaurants, more expanded beer menus at restaurants,” says Herz.
Cities are thirsty to be a part of the booming craft beer industry. In an effort to grow its local economy, one town in Oregon has even offered financial incentives to a craft brewer opening a new business in its community.
Craft distilleries have also experienced a boom — albeit on a much smaller scale.
For the past decade, the number of brick-and-mortar independent distilleries has grown by the double digits every year, according to a study financed by the American Craft Spirits Organization. The report also found that the amount of liquor distributed increased by 18.5 percent annually.
Interest in craft distilled liquors may have helped local business owners, says Celebration Distillation Founder James Michalopoulos. His distillery in New Orleans is the first craft distillery in the U.S. to bottle rum, supplied by the large amount of sugar cane that grows nearby.
“It piqued my interest that there was so much sugar cane, and not one distillery in Louisiana — or the even the U.S.,” Michalopoulos says.
His company has been able to grow its operations from two to 18 employees — an increase of 800 percent — with most of its hiring occurring during the past decade, a time period during which Louisiana experienced a doubling of its unemployment rate after Hurricane Katrina.
But anecdotally, Michalopoulos says, the market is more volatile than many make it seem. The barrier of entry for distilling includes steep prices and stiff competition against larger companies — all unfavorable conditions for small business owners.
“If you want to truly characterize the marketplace, it’s pretty skewed,” he says. “What there is are small businesses with people working very hard on a local level, and rightfully getting a certain interest in the product. And they’ve taken a very tiny sliver of the market and working it, but with limited success.”
Nonetheless, growth continues within the industry, primarily in states such as California, New York, Washington and Colorado, which house more than a quarter of all distilleries in the U.S.
If craft distilleries maintain this upward trend — much like craft breweries have — there’s tremendous potential for more jobs to be created within the sector. Cheers to that.
Homepage photo by Eddie Hernandez Photography/Getty Images.
The Beer-Fueled Project That’s Prettifying Pittsburgh
What’s better at bringing people together than shared mugs of beer? In one Pennsylvania city, two drinking buddies think they might have an answer: hops.
At two sites in Pittsburgh — an unseemly roadside retaining wall in Stanton Heights and a recently shuttered YMCA in Hazelwood — hop plants are adding some much-needed greenery on their crawl up 10-foot-high trellis systems. Used to add a bitter, zesty flavor to beer, the leafy hop cones are being donated to three local craft breweries, who will then donate the proceeds from each batch of beer brewed back to community projects.
The seeds for Hops on Lots Pittsburgh (HOLP) were planted in Pete Bell’s mind during a community gardening class. A part-time trade-show coordinator, Bell loved the idea that those without backyards could share a plot with their neighbors. But he wondered if there was a better way for all the produce and herbs he was learning to grow to benefit the entire community, not, he says, just the people who are able to garden. One night, over drinks with friend Joe Chmielewski, an operational support assistant at the University of Pittsburgh library, the conversation turned to how the two men could find a project they’d enjoy that would, in turn, benefit others. The pals, who Bell confesses enjoy “a lot of beer,” decided on growing hops. They believed the urban agriculture could support the red-hot craft-brew scene while prettifying some of the city’s 27,000 vacant lots.
“There are so many little breweries everywhere. They’re popping up, it seems, by the month,” Bell says. And yet, “nobody in the area was growing any hops.” Microbreweries around town jumped at the offer of locally harvested hops. “They like the idea that they’re fresh, right off the vine,” says Bell. “They don’t have to get hops shipped in from the other side of the country.”
Bell waters the hops two or three times a week, with five-liter jugs he keeps in the back of his car. The plants at both sites have grown to full size, pleasing the guys who nurtured them from seedlings. Now, says Bell, he’s watering the Stanton Heights crop in a narrow two-foot space between the retaining wall and a busy road.
Seeing HOLP’s success, Bell’s already scoping out sites to grow more hops next season, and as ale aficionados contact him from other cities, he’s helping to spread the idea nationwide. He warns them to be patient in waiting for other people to get on board, but he promises the idea is a sure-fire win: “Throw them in the corner of a community garden, and you have a cash crop there,” he advises. Bell says he’s willing to take calls from any aspiring gardeners.
That is, after he recovers from yesterday’s party. On September 18th, HOLP held its first annual celebration to raise money for the Stanton Heights community. (The funds have yet to be allocated, but Bell says money will go to fixing playgrounds, renovating the firehouse, installing rain barrels, or whatever else residents want to see.) Revelers poured into Roundabout Brewery to try to the pale ale brewed from the local hops, eat pizza and dance to the strains of a bluegrass band. Amid the carousing, a toast was in order: Here’s to more beer next year!
Why You Should Drink Beer From These 5 Breweries
Beer is the nation’s alcoholic beverage of choice. But after knocking a few back, it’s easy to forget that a six-pack’s resource-intensive production can lead to a nasty hangover for the environment. Barley is often trucked from miles away, and electricity surges are needed to heat and cool huge tanks of water.
No need to despair (or drink away your sorrow). You can order the next round from any of these five American breweries that emphasize being eco-friendly. Bottoms up!
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If those aren’t enough breweries to get you tipsy, check out these other beer-makers who have signed the Climate Declaration, demanding legislators to take action on climate change: Allagash Brewing Co. (Maine), Deschutes Brewery (Ore.), Kona Brewing Co. (Hawaii), Ninkasi Brewing Co. (Ore.), Odell Brewing (Colo.), Redhook Brewery (Wash.) and Smuttynose Brewing Co. (N.H.).
(Homepage image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
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Drinking Beer is Making the World a Better Place
Who says changing the world can’t be fun?
The Oregon Public House in Portland — aka the “world’s first nonprofit pub” — donates 100 percent of profits to charity, the Good News Network reports.
We’re not kidding. Choose whatever food or drink you’d like, then pick which charity you want your dollars to go to from the menu’s revolving list of organizations, such as United Cerebral Palsy, local youth outreach program Braking Cycles and more.
According to The Oregonion, every last penny is donated to the charities. And they’re willing to prove it to you: The establishment keeps their books open to the public to anyone who cares to look.
Yelp reviewers are overwhelmingly positive, praising the restaurant’s friendly atmosphere as well as the “great beer, food and charity menu.”
So how much dough has been raised? This past August, the restaurant posted a photo boasting that an incredible $32,021 has been collected for charity.
MORE: The Restaurant Without a Cash Register
Opening a pub is no easy task — especially one that doesn’t keep any of its profits. The Oregonion described that construction took more than three years and required about $100,000 in fundraising, as well as roughly $150,000 in donated materials and labor.
“It has taken thousands of hours, hundreds of thousands of dollars and hundreds of volunteers to make this what it is,” owner Ryan Saari tells FOX12, adding that the pub opened debt free with the help of its donors and volunteers.
The pub is run by a board made up entirely of volunteers (all of which have full-time jobs) as well as a few full-time employees who work and run the restaurant. “No one. Literally no one is ‘making money’ off this idea or our business,” the pub says. “This is a profit-generating machine for, and only for, the charities we support.”
It’s a ground-breaking model that restaurants chains and corporations should take note of. As the pub says, “We believe this could begin a new wave of business and mission that has the possibility of changing the way we work, spend, and care for our communities.”
Now that’s something to get buzzed about.
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DON’T MISS: Helping Veterans Is As Easy As Drinking This Beer. Seriously.
Helping Veterans Is As Easy As Drinking This Beer. Seriously.
In the summertime, the most exertion many of us are willing to commit involves turning over some hamburgers on the barbecue. But a new brewery with a special mission is making helping veterans as easy as cracking open a bottle of beer.
Navy veteran Paul Jenkins and Marine Corps veteran Mike Danzer founded the Veteran Beer Company in 2012 with the goal of easing the veteran employment crunch by creating a company that would employ veterans and generate profits that could be donated to charities that help veterans. They began selling their two varieties—Blonde Bomber and The Veteran—on Veteran’s Day in 2013, and the company has been expanding ever since.
“We only anticipated to sell about 2,000 cases our first year,” Josh Ray, regional director of Veteran Brewing Company told Nicole Johnson of Valley News Live. “After four months, we did over 30,000 cases, and we’re pretty close to approaching 60,000 cases right now.”
Beer drinkers can now find Veteran Beer Company’s brews for sale in Indiana, Illinois, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Ten percent of the profits go to veterans’ charities, and the rest is channeled back into the company. Veteran Beer Company, which brews its beer in Cold Spring, Minnesota, employs only veterans, and plans to hire more vets as it continues to expand.
“Some of the things that veterans are promised aren’t really always followed through on,” Ray said. “With this, it’s really our opportunity to give back.” And anyone planning to buy a six pack to celebrate a lazy summer afternoon can give back too.
MORE: When This Marine Couldn’t Find A Job, He Started A Business To Help Other Returning Vets
A Beer Company Focuses on Donations, Not Profits
Walk down any busy street of a city, and you’ll hopefully find a food truck that best fits your appetite. Becoming increasingly popular among urban dwellers, these mobile restaurants serve everything from burgers and fries to tacos and nachos and even lobster rolls.
However, one food truck won’t serve meals to their customers — but they’ll graciously accept them.
Finnegans beer launched their “Reverse Food Truck” in March to help feed the hungry. Their plan? To travel around Minnesota in their green vehicle until October, with the goal of collecting $50,000 worth of cash or credit card donations and non-perishable items. But that’s not all.
According to their Facebook page, the beer company (which sells a blonde ale and an Irish amber) says 100 percent of their profits will go towards feeding the hungry. They also began a social media campaign to keep people in the loop as to where the food truck will be stationed every day, according to ABC News.
The Reverse Food Truck has also created campaigns to increase its donations among passersby. One photo that Finnegans tweeted conveyed the message that you could win free beer for a month if you made a donation.
Jacquie Berglund, CEO of Finnegans, Inc. says the organization is not only pushing to increase its donations, but they are also partnering up with farmers in the area.
“In addition to raising funds, and collecting non-perishables, we’re also supporting local growers to get organic produce to those in need — and we have a lot of farmers in the area!” she tells ABC News. “So the wealth that we create in the community goes back to the community.
In partnership with the Emergency Foodshelf Network’s Harvest for the Hungry Program, Finnegans beer’s Reverse Food Truck has raised approximately 5,700 pounds of produce that’s already been delivered to the hungry.
But even if you can’t run to the Reverse Food Truck in time, you can always make a difference by donating using a virtual food menu. The Finnegans website provides a menu that shows you how much of a difference your gift will make. Donate $10 and you’ve just provided someone with food for five days; donate $100 and you can feed a family of four for two weeks.
How are local patrons reviewing the Reverse Food Truck? “This is a new thing for me, but as soon as I saw it, I came right up and [threw] some money in it,” Jacob Ciuraru told NPR. “A little bit goes a long way sometimes.”
MORE: Food Cowboy: Teaching Truck Drivers ‘Nothing Goes to Waste’
Brewers Fight Proposed Regulation That Would End Grain Recycling Initiatives
If you’re a lover of the brewsky, then Denver is the city for you.
The Mile High city brews more beer than any other American city, and the state of Colorado boasts over 140 microbreweries. So it probably won’t surprise beer lovers here in the “Napa of beer” that many brewers are using their drinks as forces for environmental and economic good, donating their spent grains — barley, hops, wheat and other grains that have been soaked in water during the beer-brewing process — to farmers who can use them to feed their livestock, instead of throwing them away.
Oskar Blues, a Longmont-based brewery, runs the Hops and Heifers program. In a process it calls “Farm to Cup,” the brewery grows hops on its own farm, uses the hops for brewing, feeds its cattle with the spent grains, and then uses the meat from these cows in burgers sold at its restaurant.
But newly proposed FDA rules threaten to disrupt innovative recycling programs such as this, forcing microbreweries to send the spent grains to landfills or else engage in a costly process of drying out the grains and packaging them to prevent anyone from touching them before they reach the farmers. For many small brewers, the cost of this would be too great and they’d be forced to choose the landfill option.
According to John Fryar of the Longmont Times-Call, Paul Gatza, who directs the Boulder-based 20,000-member strong Brewers Association, spoke with FDA officials who say they’ll change the rule before issuing new draft of the regulations this summer. “The wording in the original proposed rules was pretty bad,” Gatza said. He estimates that the new rule would cost breweries $5 more per barrel to process the grains before donating or selling them to farmers, potentially putting many small brewers out of the recycling business. That would have been a shame, as a recent Brewers Association survey found that members reuse 90 percent of their spent grains.
FDA spokeswoman Juli Putnam told Fryar that they’ve gone back to the drawing board, rewriting some of the language in the regulation in a way that will hopefully allow this beer positivity cycle to continue. Now that’s good news worth lifting a beer over.
MORE: His Family Lost its Farm. Now He’s Making Sure No One Else in His Community Suffers the Same Fate.
How Colorado Locals Are Banding Together to Save Their Beer
Coloradans love their beer — especially when it’s brewed in the state using crisp Rocky Mountain water and fresh local ingredients. So in 2010 when AC Golden Brewing Co., the craft arm of MillerCoors, put out a call for locals to help the company grow hops for its Colorado Native Lager, volunteers were quick to hop to it (pun intended) and plant themselves a garden. The way the program works is that AC Golden invests in the plants and mails them out to participants along with instructions on how to grow them. At the end of the season, the volunteers give whatever crop they yield back to the brewers to use in their beer. In the program’s first year, about 50 or 60 amateur gardeners got involved. Since then, the number of volunteers has ballooned year over year. Jeff Nickels, AC Golden’s head brewer, told Modern Farmer that in 2013, 750 volunteers signed up, yielding enough hops to brew 120 barrels — about 1 percent of the company’s yearly output. That may sound like small potatoes, but the Colorado Native Hops Grower program wasn’t exactly created to fulfill the company’s hops needs. It was built to promote the beer — which incidentally is the only lager brewed with 100 percent Colorado ingredients — while also showcasing a concerted effort to bring more hops crops to the state.
MORE: How to Turn a Vending Machine Into a Farmer’s Market
While the interest for locally produced hops is there, high entry costs and lack of knowledge has kept Colorado gardeners from trying to compete with states like Washington, Oregon and Idaho. According to Ron Godin, a hops specialist from Colorado State University, farmers would need to invest about $20,000 per acre and about three years to get a hops farm going. That’s a lot of time to be waiting to brew. In the meantime, AC Golden has brought in experts to help farmers get their hops crops hopping. But it’s not easy. Some crops have been unsuccessful, as the potential for pests, mold and mildew is high. If a crop is harvested, AC Golden is paying a premium for it. Colorado hops are selling for about $15 per pound, about five times the USDA’s reported average price in 2012.
Volunteers in the Hop Grower program have faced some of the same challenges, of course on a smaller scale. Participant K.C. Dunstan remembers his first harvest — eight hours of picking the cones led not only to raw and irritated skin due to the plant’s thorny nature and three ounces of product. Still, the volunteers enjoy contributing, even in a small part, to the local beer scene. “It’s really impressive to me that people like our company well enough and like our beer well enough to help us out and grow for us,” Nickel says. “If helping us means they enjoy it more, we are doing our job.”
ALSO: This Partnership Encourages Vets to Become Farmers