Shanks chosen to recycle Heineken’s brown bottles

Waste management company Shanks Group plc has been awarded a contract to recycle 15,000 tonnes of glass bottles for international beer brewer Heineken.

Shanks’s new Van Tuijl glass recycling business in the Netherlands will recycle Heineken’s entire inventory of brown bottles – approximately nine million 330-millilitre brown beer bottles – as part of the beer brewer’s newly announced shift to selling beer solely in its trademark green bottles.

Currently, the Netherlands is the only country in which Heineken beer is sold in brown, rather than green, bottles. According to Heineken, this was due to an agreement between Dutch breweries that stated that all beer should be sold in brown bottles in order to simplify the deposit system and recycling. However, it will now be shifting to the green bottle to unify the brand.

Heineken will be rolling out the green bottles in the Netherlands in February 2013.

Michael van Hulst, Managing Director of Shanks, Benelux, said: “Heineken is a key customer for us and we are delighted to be helping them transition to green bottles as part of their stated ambition to be the greenest international brewer in the world. This contract clearly illustrates how Shanks enables its customers to achieve their sustainability targets.”