Carbon footprint labeling on beer cans

A Japanese brewery is test marketing beer cans with carbon footprint labeling. Do you care?

Mon, Jan 12 2009 at 10:22 AM

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Carbon Footprint

It’s a summer evening. All the neighborhood kids are running up and down the block. The moms are sharing a bottle of wine and the dads are standing around with their beers. I can just hear the conversation among the men on my street now.

“Want another?”

“I don’t know. The carbon footprint on that can is pretty hefty. Got anything with lower CO2 emissions?”

On second thought, I really don’t think I’ll ever hear that exact conversation. But who knows? Maybe one day the carbon footprint of beer will be easy enough to detect that the men in my neighborhood will at least have the option of taking it into consideration.

One Japanese brewery, Sapporo, is taking the first steps to make that possible by test marketing carbon footprint labels on their cans. The Converting Curmudgeon (I love the word curmudgeon) reports

the labels will show the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during the production process of each can of beer, all the way from operating agricultural machinery to grow barley and hops to recycling the empty can. The labels will go on 350-ml cans of Sapporo's main brand, Black Label beer. Sapporo said it can calculate CO2 emissions as it secures barley and hops through contracts with farms across the world.

I did a search to see if I could find any other breweries that place carbon footprint labeling on their beer, and I couldn’t find any. It looks as if Sopporo is taking the lead in this area.

What do you think? Even if you buy beer from a local brewery, the ingredients the brewery uses can come from all over the country, perhaps the world. Would carbon footprint information on a beer’s label help you determine whether to buy it or not?

Image: Atilla1000

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Comments: 3

Tracey Shrier Jun 23 2009 at 1:44 AM

My boyfriend and I took a trip to the Stone Brewery company near San Diego last winter to taste some delicious microbrews and get a tour on how they are made. Throughout the tour I realized that they use a different type of label. Usually when I'm drinking a beer, I sometimes get that bad habit of peeling off my label and tossing it away or rolling it into a ball and throwing it at the nearest friend I feel like picking on. But with the Stone beers they didnt have a paper label. The gargoyle

.... More

was imprinted on the glass. Now is this any greener or worse? They arnt cutting down any trees to make labels for their beers but I couldnt find any information about what type of ink they are using on the glass.