Beer Truck
It’s nice when scientific studies confirm your gut instincts.
I recently compared the weights of one-gallon bottles in glass, plastic, tin and aluminum and surmised that aluminum provides advantages in physical distribution of consumer products like beer simply because of its lighter weight.
A study in Germany confirms my instincts. The Wuppertal Institute conducted a study and concluded that since the average aluminum beer can weighs less than an ounce, while a glass bottle is close to 6 ounces, the latter results in higher greenhouse-gas emissions, since heavier items need more fuel to transport. In fact, they estimate that the trucking of glass bottles generates 20 percent more greenhouse gases than aluminum cans.
The analysis applies to both aluminum bottles and cans with the former having the added advantage of being resealable. Let’s hope we’ll see more beer trucks carrying aluminum bottles in the near future.
