In 1959, Bill Coors pioneered the two-piece recyclable aluminum can, a move that revolutionized the beverage industry.

While the economics didn't necessarily make sense because there was no nationwide recycling system at the time, Coors spent nearly $10 million to develop recyclable cans and another $100,000 a month to produce them. Coors then actively encouraged other beverage companies to embrace the recyclable can.

In the early ’70s, Coors introduced the first nationwide recycling program, Cash for Cans, which kicked off aluminum recycling in America.

In 1990, the company became the first brewer to recycle more cans than it produced, when its recycling rate hit 107%.

We save ~64 million pounds of new aluminum from being produced every year in the US by using recycled aluminum. That’s enough to make 3.6 million bicycles – one for every person in Chicago and San Francisco.

Since 2009, our breweries have been committed to achieving zero waste to landfill, recycling wastes by turning spent barley into cattle feed and yeast into pet food. Now all our major Coors Light breweries are zero waste to landfill, meaning that no matter how much beer we produce, more than 99.5% of waste gets reused, recycled or turned into energy.

Since 2016, we’ve reduced our carbon footprint in the US by nearly 30%, saving more than 1.6 million metric tons of CO2e. 

We’ve also reduced the amount of water used in our processes, saving 1.3 billion gallons of water in the US since 2016 – the equivalent of roughly 2,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools.