Milwaukee – Tap it, don’t scrap it.
With metal prices rising, beer makers say they expect to lose hundreds of thousands of kegs and millions of dollars this year as those stainless steel holders of brew are stolen and sold for scrap.
The beer industry is coupling with the scrap-metal-recycling industry to let metal buyers know they can’t accept kegs unless they’re sold by the breweries that own them. The industry also is pushing for legislation that would require scrap-metal recyclers to ask for identification and proof of ownership from would-be sellers.
The beer industry’s main trade group, the Beer Institute, noticed the problem in the past few years as it saw more brewers reporting missing kegs, resulting in an industrywide loss of up to $50 million a year, said Jeff Becker, president of the Beer Institute.
“It really got people’s attention because that’s a significant flow of our kegs that we’ll never see again,” Becker said. “We know some of it’s very innocent, but some of it’s not.”
The theft problem is twofold, he said. Some average keg-buying customers opt to forgo their deposits, which sometimes range from $10 to $30, because they can cover that expense, and then some, if they sell to scrap dealers.
He could not say how much kegs go for, because prices change locally. But given metal prices in the past year, a keg could fetch $15 to $55 or more at scrap yards.
While only about 12 percent of the nation’s beer is sold in kegs each year, it costs brewers as much as $150 to replace each keg, so the thefts have a big impact. In the past few years, breweries have collectively lost about 300,000 kegs a year, Becker said, out of an estimated 10.7 million in circulation.
Molson Coors Brewing Co. is studying its thefts and working with distributors to keep better track of kegs, said Al Timothy, vice president for government affairs. The Denver-based brewer saw its keg losses double from 2005 to last year. The company has about 800,000 kegs in circulation at any time.
