beer can

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0.5 l beer cans made of tinplate (FE) with stay-on-tab closure (Germany, around 2004)
Pulled off, so-called pull tab (1970s)
The improper disposal of cans was an argument of the proponents of the one-way deposit.
Beer cans before filling

A beer can is a beverage can that contains beer , the so-called canned beer . Sheet metal made of steel or aluminum is used as the material for beer cans ; on the European continent, containers with a capacity of 0.25, 0.33, 0.5 and 1 liter are common.

history

The first beer can - the very first beverage can - was introduced in the USA in 1933 . The bottler was the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company , the material was tinplate. The brewery tested the market for the new form of distribution. After the consumers had reacted positively, the beer cans went on sale on January 24, 1935.

Due to the metal shortage during the Second World War , the production of beer cans was largely stopped in the 1940s and only resumed after the war.

The first beer cans did not have an integrated closure, but had to be "pierced" by the consumer with a sharp tool such as a can opener . The Pittsburgh Brewery was the first to introduce the "pull-tab" in 1962. However, since a piece of sheet metal was pulled out of the lid with the help of a ring, this fell off as separate waste and was often carelessly thrown on the floor as a small, sharp-edged piece. As a result, beverage cans in general had a rapidly growing image problem with increasing popularity.

In the 1970s, various attempts were made to modify the closure so that it did not accumulate as a separate waste. The problem was then solved with the 1977 patented “Stay-On-Tab-Closure”, or “stay-tab” for short, by the American Daniel F. Cudzik ( Reynolds Metals Company ). Canned drinks suppliers advertised the new technology and this image problem seemed to have been solved.

Can deposit in Germany

Beverage cans were popular with consumers in Germany because cans were light, quick to cool and easy to throw away. In addition, no deposit was levied on beverage cans. The growing share of canned beers in total beer sales in Germany in the 1990s was one of the decisive factors behind the introduction of the so-called can deposit. In addition to the ecological arguments against single-use can packaging (high energy consumption in production, littering of the landscape with empty cans), economic-political arguments also played a role in the case of beer: large national breweries used the cans to increase their market share compared to local small and medium-sized enterprises, which sold their beer in returnable returnable bottles and could not bear the costs of switching to can filling. After the introduction of a deposit on beer cans in Germany in 2003, canned beer sales fell significantly, and several retail chains removed canned beer completely and (again) introduced returnable bottles made of glass or plastic ( PET ).

Individual evidence

  1. The beer can celebrates birthday , n-tv .com of 22 January 2010; Retrieved March 19, 2011
  2. History of canned beer ( Memento of the original from January 9, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , dosenbier.org, accessed August 6, 2012 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dosenbier.org
  3. End closure for a container patent description US D244915 S by Daniel F. Cudzik (Reynolds Metals Company)

Web links

Commons : Beer Can  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Beer can  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations