Beer kegs
This is either heartbreaking or glorious news, depending on your attitude towards the consumption of alcohol, anyway. Every year breweries lose millions of dollars in stolen and lost kegs. It’s a problem of simple mathematics: the typical deposit to get a keg is between $10-$30, but a keg is worth up to $50 when sold for scrap metal, and each replacement keg costs about $150 to manufacture. So some people, rather than returning their kegs, are forgoing their deposit fee and getting more money at the scrapyard. Even worse, others are simply going around behind restaurants and bars and stealing the unsecured kegs and then selling them for scrap.
It’s kind of hard to see what breweries should do at this point to cut down on their losses. They could simply stop selling beer in nice kegs, opting instead for multiple smaller thin-walled aluminum containers, but that would really take the fun out of throwing a kegger, and it wouldn’t work so well for bars, which would have to more frequently change out the supplies leading to the beers on tap. The deposit fee on kegs could be raised to the actual value of the keg, or at least an amount higher than its worth as scrap metal, but that would reduce the number of people buying kegs, and it wouldn’t solve the theft problem.
I suppose the best solution to this conundrum is two-fold. As much as I don’t like additional legislation, I think it might be necessary here: pass a law prohibiting scrapyards from buying kegs unless proof of ownership is provided. This way breweries will still be able to sell back kegs, but no one else will. It’s not really a loss of freedom because technically the customers never own the kegs anyway; they always remain property of the brewery. Also, make bars and restaurants responsible for the full values of the kegs, so if they use inadequate security measures then they incur the losses rather than the breweries. While it is unreasonable to ask “civilian” customers to pony up a $150 deposit, bars and restaurants that do a regular business can afford to pay market rates for whatever number of kegs they have in inventory, and then they can just trade in empty kegs for full ones, or get the full value back.
Even with these added measures, though, kegs may simply be becoming too expensive to continue to use. They do require the use of a lot of expensive metal. Maybe the future will see hard plastic kegs, or even large durable plastic bags full of beer? Restaurants are already buying their condiments and soda syrups that way.
