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Friday Night Beer Blog: Plastic Labels Problem Edition [1]

['Wafflehacker Aka Joshhacks', 'Doctor Who', 'Bill In Portland Maine']

Date: 2026-07-24  

Contrary to the glass, this beer is not from Belgium 🙂 chingchongchinaman

Greetings, beer lovers! ‘Tis Friday night (well, obviously), and once (or not) again, ‘tis chingchongchinaman back as your guest FNBB blogger, with esquimaux taking a well-earned from FNBB duties. Tonight’s FNBB flips the script, where, instead of ending the diary with tonight’s featured beer chez 3CM, he starts with said beer. This is a “Skald” lager from Troubles End Brewery (Collegeville, PA), a very nice lager indeed, clean, straightforward, and unpretentious. Troubles End Brewery describes “Skald” as follows:

“German malt and a single decoction with American grown Saaz Hops, fermented under pressure with our Czech Lager yeast to create natural carbonation”

If you like lagers and you find this on your local store shelf (or if you’re driving through Collegeville, PA), I highly recommend this lager. What sparked this diary, however, was not the beer itself (terrific though it is), but the label on the can. Self the loser noted this text in the label’s corner:

“please peel label to make can recyclable”

It may show how late 3CM the loser is to the party that I’d never seen that text on a craft beer can before. I then went down the internet rabbit hole to look up about peelable labels on beer cans. Sure enough, these labels are a problem for recycling and thus for the environment, as described in one article from April 2023 by Marty Jones at the Craft Brewing Business website (which seems not have posted anything new since the end of 2025, but 3CM the loser digresses as usual). Jones’ article has enough (depressingly insightful) nuggets that it’s tempting to quote almost the whole article, even broken up into sections. Even granted that this article is 3 years old, it’s probably a reasonable guess that Americans’ recycling rates haven’t improved since then, when, as Jones wrote about aluminum can recycling rates in Colorado:

“Just 16 percent of aluminum cans are recycled in the state where canned craft beer began. Nationwide only about half of all aluminum cans are recycled.”

But then Jones calls out craft breweries:

“How are craft brewers contributing to the problem? For starters, the recycling messages championed by the first wave of micro-canners have faded or disappeared entirely. An astonishing number of today’s craft beer cans – especially those from smaller breweries – include no recycling symbol or message on their cans. Nothing. Many of those that include such a message do so in the can’s tiniest, magnifying-glass-required font with an equally miniscule arrowed triangle.”

Jones then goes on to those labels on craft beer cans, and quotes Marti Matsch, then (and now), the deputy director at Eco-Cycle in Colorado:

“Marti Matsch, deputy director for Colorado’s Eco-Cycle, recalls the day she discovered labeled beer cans on the line at a sorting facility. ‘What is this? … What have they done to our favorite material?’ Printed aluminum cans, she notes, ‘are the poster child of recycling. Most of all, they pay the bills for all that we do.’”

This then is the kicker (well, one of several) in how those plastic labels mess up aluminum can recycling (the bold is from Jones):

“Cans with shrink wrap and plastic labels, she and other experts say, are identified as plastic as they pass by sorting sensors, and they get kicked in with plastic materials. That deprives recyclers of precious aluminum, contaminates their plastic, and leads to a sad finale for cans that reach plastic processors. ‘It’s our understanding,’ Matsch says, ‘that they end up in landfills.’”

One more twist of the knife is from Larry Odle, then (and perhaps still) of Rocky Mountain Recycling:

“We sell aluminum cans to a smelter, and they want 100 percent aluminum, not plastic. “You’ve got an aluminum product that is 100 percent recyclable and infinitely recyclable. It’s perfect. And now we have people knowingly adding plastic to it. It’s stupid, it’s wasteful, it’s not good environmental stewardship. I wish craft brewers were aware of this problem.”

The irony in terms of beer is that the mass market beers that craft breweries and fans of craft beer love to hate, i.e. Budweiser, Coors, PBR, Miller, all use cans without those plastic labels, and pretty much have always done so, and with their brand directly printed in the aluminum, precisely because economy of scale allows those big firms to do that. The smaller scales of craft breweries generally don’t appear to allow direct printing of different craft beer flavors on those cans. In terms of money, it’s simpler to use those plastic labels.

In fairness to at least one craft brewing company, in light of Odle’s screed above, Three Notch’d Brewing Company (Charlottesville, VA) has a page on “How To Recycle Your Beer Cans”, which reads in part:

“Remove the Label ♻️ While beer cans themselves are recyclable, the labels on them can cause issues during the recycling process. When beer cans are recycled, they are melted down and turned into new aluminum products. However, the labels on the cans, which are typically made of a different type of material than the aluminum cans themselves, can cause impurities to be introduced into the melting process, resulting in lower quality recycled aluminum. This can also cause issues with the machinery used to process the aluminum, potentially damaging equipment. Additionally, many recycling facilities have strict guidelines on what materials they will accept, and leaving labels on beer cans may cause them to be rejected.”

So what to do? One top-down possibility is for craft breweries to use digital printing, although I don’t know off hand the costs of digital printing onto aluminum would affect (i.e. increase) the cost of their product. Certainly as an individual, speaking from the bottom-up, the very least that I can do is to start peeling the labels. It won’t make a large difference as an individual, but even that small positive difference is better than not doing it. (Kind of like voting, yes?) On the small chance that anyone who stumbles across this diary also starts to peel the labels when s/he had not done so before, that would be another benefit, however unlikely the chance.

BTW, below that admonition to peel the label, to give artist’s credit where credit is due, about the artwork on the Skald label, assuming that I’ve got the links correct, not that anyone here will check 🙂 , although her politics might merit approval from the DK crowd:

Having done the Debbie Downer thing with the subject at hand, here’s a happier music video, of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G (plus an encore, also French [but of course – feel free to adopt cartoon snooty faux-French accent], so keep watching past the concerto) from a week ago on the other side of pond (enjoy it now before it gets taken down):

With that, time to turn things over to you folks. What are you sipping tonight? Anyone brewing their own? And does / will anyone here peel the labels from craft beer cans after finishing with them? 😉

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/7/24/800073791/community/friday-night-beer-blog-plastic-labels-problem-edition/

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