Recycling - A look into Ontario, Canada's Beer Store recycling programme

Mississauga, Ont. (October 2, 2009) – The Beer Store (TBS) today released its seventh edition of “Responsible Stewardship”, reporting on the remarkable performance and continued improvement of its world renowned deposit return based packaging recovery system. As the single largest collection system for consumer packaging in Canada, The Beer Store has once again set a global benchmark for the collection, reuse and recycling of beer packaging.

For the 12 month period May 1, 2008, through April 30, 2009, the following environmental landmarks were achieved:

• Ontario beer consumers returned over 1.86 billion of the 1.97 billion beer containers sold in the province for an impressive 94 per cent return rate -- a one percentage point increase over the previous year’s rate of 93 per cent;
• 1.4 billion refillable beer containers were returned setting an incredible recovery rate of 99 per cent of all refillable bottles sold – a one percentage point increase over last year’s rate of 98 per cent. The Canadian brewing industry’s standard refillable beer bottle enjoys the highest return rate of any package in the world. Refilling beer bottles rather than manufacturing new bottles for each serving also helps avoid the creation of 131,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each and every year;
• Aluminum can returns posted an encouraging 5 percentage point increase rising from 74 per cent last year to 79 per cent this year. All aluminum collected is recycled back into new aluminum cans or other products manufactured from aluminum sheet; Non-refillable glass bottles were returned at an 89 per cent rate also up by one percentage point over last year.

Source- http://www.thebeerstore.ca/AboutUs/press_room.asp