Environmental Effects of Beer Packaging

This month’s column will examine the findings from a recent study on the environmental impact of various kinds of beer packaging. This study was sponsored by—and applied data directly from—the supplier and the brewer. Thus, by definition, it is biased toward the favored materials. It is intuitively obvious that these life-cycle analyses of beer packaging in four different containers would result in information tilted toward those who paid for the investigation.

A reason for believing the precedi…