Coors plastic beer bottle project

Materials-competition case in beverage packaging. Coors had to engineer around permeability and residual-monomer issues to market a plastic beer bottle.

Basically when one material in the food-beverage business gets a little edge over the others through new technology, the others will start doing things to get better. We use virtually all materials for beverages, so it's not something I can tell you at a 40,000-foot level: you should always use aluminum for beer cans, no. If you're a purist you should use glass for beer. A year and a half ago, one of the breweries was advertising — I think it was Coors — that they had plastic beer bottles. They had to do a lot of work to make sure you didn't taste plastic. Plastics are more permeable, and you also have to make sure you don't have any monomers left in that plastic, that all of a sudden the EPA or the health people are going to be all over you.