Plastic ring will no longer be around six-packs of Coors Light. Parent company, Molson Coors announced the beer will instead come in a recyclable, sustainable cardboard alternative starting later this year. It is now the largest U.S. beer brand to make such a change.
“We’re chill about a lot of things, but single-use plastic isn’t one of them,” Coors Light said in a tweet on Tuesday. “So we’re eliminating plastic rings from our packaging, starting this year and finishing by 2025.”
This is just one of a series of environmental goals Molson Coors is looking to achieve by 2025. The company’s sustainability push also includes:
- Ensuring all packaging is 100 percent reusable, recyclable or compostable and all plastic packaging is made from 30 percent recycled content.
- Growing Coors barley in 10 percent less water.
- Brewing beer in 22 percent less water.
- Restoring 3.5 billion gallons of water to watersheds.
- Reducing greenhouse gas emissions by half in direct operations and by 20 percent across the company’s supply chain.
The $85 million capital investment to replace plastic rings will apply to all of the approximately 30 brands that Molton Coors distributes in North America, according to a CNN report.
“We believe that buying beer shouldn’t mean buying plastic,” Marcelo Pascoa, vice president of marketing for the Coors family of brands, told Food & Wine. “That’s why we’re taking a step toward making packaging even more sustainable, and with this achievement Coors Light will save 400,000 pounds of single-use plastic from becoming waste every year.”
While Coors is the first U.S. beer company to ditch plastic, Danish brewery Carlsberg and Corona “both implemented or trialed alternatives in 2018,” according to EcoWatch. And in the UK, Guinness, Coors and Budweiser have switched from plastic rings to a paper alternative, according to Food & Wine.
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