The San Diego Brewcycling Collaborative

As canned beers have largely replaced bottled product over the past decade, Paktech’s four- and six-pack can holders have risen to ubiquitous prominence. While efficient and made from plastic, it turns out they are rather difficult to recycle. Much as plastic bags and electronics are not accepted for residential curbside pickup, Paktechs can’t simply be tossed into a recycling bin, creating a conundrum for breweries wanting to keep from populating landfills with a rainbow-colored array of plastic waste.

Rather than throw his hands up, Thorn Brewing General Manager Tom Kiely consulted colleagues from various organizations and set out on a mission to solve the problem. Along the way, he and his ever-growing team discovered that, by working together, it would be possible to recycle a variety of oft-used brewery materials on a large scale. Enter the San Diego Brewcycling Collaborative, a fledgling group of beverage producers that have partnered with the County of San Diego, Slow Food Urban San Diego and reclamation-based apparel and accessory producer, The Bountiful Bag, to make a difference.

The following is Kiely’s first-hand account of how the collective came to be and how other San Diego County business can get involved.

A different kind of San Diego craft-beer collaboration

By Tom Kiely, Thorn Brewing

Back in 2018, Thorn started a Paktech recycling program which incentivized customers to turn their Packtechs in to our brewery so that they could be re-used. It was a difficult program to run because it’s hard to stress-test Paktechs to make sure they’re strong enough to re-use, so, unfortunately, we had to scrap the program.

Simultaneously, Coronado Brewing and Saint Archer Brewing reached out to us to inquire about our program, as they were looking to do something similar. Coronado reached out to Paktech and they were willing to take their can-holders back, but only if they could send them an entire trailer load of them, which isn’t a practical solution for any single brewery.

A few months later, media outlet Vinepair interviewed our Marketing Director Anna Brigham for an article called “The Paktech Plastic Paradox”, and it reignited our desire to do something about them. So, I reached out to a volunteer group called Slow Food Urban San Diego, where I serve as the chair of their Slow Beer Committee. I informed them of my desire to develop a recycling project for the Paktechs, and my fellow SFUSD board member Ariel Hamburger, who works for the County of San Diego, connected me with one of her colleagues in the Public Works Department, who then put me in touch with Recycling Specialist Steve Weihe.

I provided Steve a handful of Paktechs and he ran an experiment with residential- and commercial-waste disposal company, EDCO’s Materials Recovery Facility. There, they determined how well Paktechs sort when they are thrown into mixed-recycling containers like the blue bins or larger blue dumpsters we’re all familiar with. Turns out…not well. Only about 50% of them were sorted correctly, as their size, shape and color impact their ability to be accurately sorted.

So, Steve connected me with a man named Ed Fitch who works for Cactus Recycling, a local recycling company that purchases baled recyclables from material users—such as breweries—and sells them back as raw materials to manufacturers such as Paktech. Ed and Steve took a tour at Thorn’s Barrio Logan brewery and identified a handful of materials which could be recycled, provided they could be properly separated and baled, two of which were grain bags and shrink wrap.

I took their findings back to my Slow Beer Committee team, which consists of Darcy Shiber-Knowles (Dr. Bronner’s), Sarah Shoffler (works for NOAA Fisheries), Eric Buchanan (Oasis Architecture & Design) and Steph Parker (Epicurean San Diego), and we decided to pursue a project to offer recycling capabilities for Paktechs, grain bags and shrink wrap to sustainability-minded breweries. I also reached out to several San Diego County breweries to see if they’d be interested in participating in such a program. Roughly 15 breweries totaling 250,000 barrels’ worth of production per year said they were game.

In addition to the breweries, I was introduced to Fio Borkert and Romi Rossel, the founders of The Bountiful Bag, who have been working on brewery-waste upcycling for several years and have a relationship with Misadventure Vodka. That company was also interested in leading a recycling program, so we joined forces. Then, my friend Morgan Tenwick, the Director of Quality at local hard-kombucha company JuneShine, connected me with their Sustainability Lead (and now Head Brewer) Luke Sutmiller, who offered up his company’s Scripps Ranch headquarters as a host site where we could have each brewery and distillery send their grain bags, shrink wrap and corrugated cardboard. Ironically, though Paktechs drove this movement, they weren’t an easy fit with JuneShine’s current operation, so we are using the other three materials to get us started and will ease Paktechs into the program later.

Next, we all met as one big group and decided we would begin by inviting a few of the breweries that showed interest to be part of a test-run of sorts we called “phase one”. We made sure to get operations of varying sizes, using Pizza Port Brewing as our large local brewery, Thorn as a small local brewery and Nickel Beer Co. as a very small local brewery, while also including JuneShine. We’ve since brought on Saint Archer and Coronado Brewing, as well as Sasha Escue from Jewish Family Service of San Diego, County of San Diego Recycling Specialist Natalia King Quick, and others from SFUSD and Thorn to further help out.

We have the base pieces in place to accomplish our goals, but we’re not done. On December 1, we are going to open things up and spend the entire month on-boarding breweries and other local beverage-manufacturing businesses that want to be involved so we can kick off the San Diego Brewcyling Collaborative in full force come January 1, 2022.

If you’d like to get involved, you can do so by sending us an email. We look forward to working with you and making a difference!