SAY NO TO PLASTIC

♻️ #REDUCE. #REUSE. #RECYCLE. 💚

Bring any suitable vessel into the shop and we will fill it with beer! Although, we have had lots of customers recently asking us to fill plastic whereas conversely we have a #NOplastic policy at Brewery Market. Our hope is that, plastic will be entirely eliminated from the retail chain. We are dedicated to providing you with the amazing craft beer in its most premium format; when you drink it at home it should be as fresh as the minute it was poured from the taps…. so we pre-condition all our bottles and cans with C02 to ensure no air touches the beer until you drink it. We strongly advise against using single use plastic/cartons for craft beer, or for life.

High density polyethylene is the plastic commonly used for milk bottles, some juice containers, and laundry products. It is shown as number 2 on the triangle code and are well-suited for packaging pasteurised products with a very short shelf life, such as milk. However, milk jugs are not well suited as food storage containers, lest we forget, craft beer is rarely pasteurised, unlike macro beers. While the plastic is considered food grade, milk containers are difficult to sanitise properly and the plastic will break down into the contents over time. 

Water stored in these containers should be used for purposes other than drinking as petroleum-based plastics like PET don't decompose the same way organic materials do. Whilst most plastic items take around 1000 years to decompose, in landfills the plastic bags we use in our everyday life will take 10-20 years. Luckily polyethylene is one of the quicker to degrade and these plastic bottles will take a mere 450 years.

However…. when UV rays strike plastic, they break the bonds holding the long molecular chain together and over time, this can turn a big piece of plastic into lots of little pieces. Sadly, plastic buried in a landfill rarely sees the light of day. But in the ocean, which is where a lot of discarded plastic ends up, it’s bathed in as much light as water. In 2009, researchers from Nihon University in Chiba, Japan, found that plastic in warm ocean water can degrade in as little as a year. This doesn't sound so bad until you realise those small bits of plastic are toxic chemicals. These end up in the guts of animals or wash up on shorelines, where humans are most likely to ingest or come into direct contact with the toxins…… and you’re probably sitting in the sun, drinking warm beer out of a milk carton…. How does that beer taste now?

Buy beer better, #DrinkDifferently 🍻