PORTLAND, Maine — Allagash Brewing Company is expanding its recycling co-op program to encourage more businesses and their customers to think and act sustainably.
The Portland-based brewery started the program in 2020 to help fellow breweries, liquor stores, and grocery stores reuse and repurpose many items that often go to waste in the beer-production process.
Twenty Maine breweries and businesses are part of the co-op, including Bissell Brothers, Mast Landing, Maine Beer Company, Rosemont Bakery, ReVision Energy, and more.
Waste such as plastic grain bags, plastic stretch wrap, and PakTech carriers are a challenge to recycle. Many waste management and recycling companies do not accept them in a typical blue single-stream bin like most people have at their homes.
The co-op allows business owners to drop off that waste at a warehouse every Friday. A commercial recycling company then picks it up. That service can be very expensive for each business to pay for on its own.
"To recycle these materials, we gather up a large amount, bail it into one compact cube, and then work with local recycling companies to make sure it’s properly disposed of. We’re at a size where we create enough of this waste that bailing it up and shipping it out to be recycled is possible," Allagash staff wrote in a blog post. "But, we realized, there are quite a few smaller breweries and businesses in our area who can’t do the same. To explain, for materials like these, you need a lot of them in order for a recycler to be able to handle them efficiently. So smaller organizations would have trouble accumulating enough."
Allagash's new environmental sustainability coordinator Zoe Malia, who has worked in the tasting room for four years, said the companies are encouraging customers to be more eco-friendly, too.
"We are always trying to educate, not only our staff on what goes where, because that could be confusing in itself, but also helping the guests and trying to make it as simple for them as possible and digestible for them," Malia said. "The other breweries are really grateful that they have a space where they can bring these materials that they can't really recycle, and bring it here, collecting it in bulk, and really getting it recycled."
In 2020, the first year of running the co-op, the co-op recycled around 52 tons of material. In 2021, the co-op recycled 70 tons.
"We kind of saw the problem and are trying to come up with a solution," Malia said.
"The more we are trained on that, we go out into the world, tell our families, tell our friends, go to other facilities and do things properly and hopefully that message is getting across," Anne Marisic, marketing and communications director for Maine Beer Company, said.
Marisic said they have lots of heavy duty cardboard to recycle, pallets, pizza boxes, hop boxes, and more.
To be specific, the items the co-op currently accepts include the following:
- PakTech Carriers
- Plastic wrap
- Grain bags
- Cardboard (paperboard, cardboard, shrink wrap tubes)
- Metal caps/cages
- Keg caps
- cans/bottles
Allagash received a grant from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection to purchase two more compacters that compress the waste into bales.
Business owners who would like to get involved should email: werecycle@allagash.com.