The distribution of goods, both locally and globally, is a fundamental aspect of contemporary everyday life that has changed profoundly during the last century, with significant environmental consequences. Packaging history is an important part of this change for retail organization and the environmental impact of consumption. Thus, single-use metal cans for beverages were central to early debates on waste, recycling, and limits to growth, and they were seen as both convenient for consumers and as a symbol of littering and disposable living. This paper explores what has been termed “the other container revolution”Footnote 1 by examining the history of the Danish recycling system for beverage containers. It emphasizes how this large technological system developed in a melting pot of different business interests, shaped by a debate about European free trade versus environmental concerns, as well as by existing infrastructures and the properties of different materials. The paper focuses on the period from 1970 to 2002, when the Danish return system changed from one based on the reuse of refillable glass bottles to recycling. In the latter system, container materials are melted and processed before being recycled back into the value chain, often at a lower quality. A key event was the Can War, a prolonged political conflict with the European Economic Community (EEC), which later became the European Union (EU), over a Danish ban on metal cans for beverages.
The paper contributes to the historical literature on the impact of business on environmental politics in three distinct ways. First, it adds an underexplored geography, focusing on the relationship between a nation-state and the EEC/EU during the decades when environmental concerns gained political momentum yet remained contested in a system based on free trade. Thus, it provides insights into the formative years of environmental politics and the challenges of balancing economic and environmental goals. In particular, it offers insights into how those goals were enmeshed with balancing European and national interests that were strongly influenced by the composition of national industries, as brewers were an important factor in Denmark. Second, the paper highlights differences between business interests within and across trades. Rather than a simple narrative of lobbyism and the protection of home industries, the Can War illustrates shifting and competing business interests and a predominantly pragmatic approach to environmentalism in a debate that shifted from being concerned with littering to a question of broader environmental concerns. However, economic arguments were always primary. Third, the paper supplements the history of business interests by emphasizing the importance of material factors, especially container material properties. In this way, it demonstrates how a textbook perception of aluminum as merely a chemical element overlooks how the material coevolved with the modern world to suit many purposes. Instead, aluminum must be viewed as a complex network of actors and connections.Footnote 2 Overall, the paper defamiliarizes the aluminum can and its role in the Danish recycling system by illustrating how it became perceived as normal despite previous opposition and a very different trajectory to the market than in other countries.Footnote 3
The paper first introduces the literature on businesses’ influence on environmental politics. Then, the historical case is presented with a focus on the arguments in the Can War, and it concludes by declaring aluminum the winner.
Businesses’ Influence on Environmental Politics
Studying the International Chamber of Commerce, Ann-Kristin Bergquist and Thomas David have identified a profound transformation of global environmental governance during the 1970s and 1980s. They have argued for a better understanding of the role of business interests in the decades leading up to the Rio Conference in 1992,Footnote 4 a period in which the EEC developed an environmental policy.Footnote 5 Thus, these scholars, among others, have called for more research on the role of businesses in shaping international environmental governance before sustainability became a buzzword and before corporate strategy scholars began advocating for a positive role for business.Footnote 6 As studies of corporate environmentalism have shown, there was a shift from a predominantly negative view of business in publications such as Limits to Growth (1972) to a more positive view in Our Common Future (1987), the United Nations (UN) report that popularized the concept of sustainability.Footnote 7 The shift was followed by the development of international environmental management standards and triple bottom line ideas.Footnote 8
Despite such developments, for a long period, there was only limited contact between business historians and environmental historians. When scholars did study the influence of business on environmental politics, they mainly focused on large multinationals or American companies, portraying a rather unified opposition to environmentalism.Footnote 9 For example, Alex Boynton has shown how opposition to environmentalism unified American conservatives in the 1970s;Footnote 10 Naomi Oreskes’s work on denying climate change has gained wide recognition;Footnote 11 and, more recently, Robert Brulle and Christian Downie have highlighted US trade associations as significant opponents of climate policies.Footnote 12 Others have explored the connection between anti-environmentalist movements and neoliberal free market ideologies.Footnote 13
In her study of canned food, Anna Zeide has focused on consumer confidence rather than environmentalism,Footnote 14 and regarding the role of packaging in corporate environmentalism, few business historians studying individual companies have addressed the subject. In his history of Unilever, Geoffrey Jones briefly mentions the company’s response to rising concerns in the 1960s over the environmental impact of packaging,Footnote 15 while Bartow J. Elmore was more thorough and critical in his study of Coca-Cola. He found that the soft drink producers switched from a system based on returnable glass bottles to throwaway containers in the 1960s due to profit motives. According to Elmore, the steel can was a “lightweight packaging [that] offered the corporate office a powerful weapon in its intracompany war with local bottlers.” It allowed Coca-Cola to eliminate hundreds of distributors, thus achieving business goals at the expense of environmental problems and increased public waste management costs.Footnote 16
Disposable containers generally gained prominence in the United States (US) over returnable ones, with few exceptions, such as the bottle-deposit legislation pioneered in Oregon in 1972. Some have emphasized convenience arguments, while for others, like Elmore, the change was mainly connected to the centralization of the beer and soft drink industries. Regardless, aluminum cans accounted for approximately ninety-seven percent of all beer and soft drinks in 1990. This did not mean that an effective recycling system was developed. The US return rate peaked in 1992, with around two-thirds of the aluminum cans collected for recycling, but the rate dropped to around half in 2018.Footnote 17 In Denmark, the 2018 return rate was eighty-nine percent and rising.Footnote 18
This difference points to the importance of research covering a broader geography, and in the last decade, researchers have unpacked more nuanced responses to environmentalism.Footnote 19 Studying Sweden, Ann-Kristin Bergquist and Kristina Söderholm, for example, have found major variations between individuals, companies, and sectors in their reaction to environmentalism.Footnote 20 In another study, Bergquist, Magnus Lindmark, and Nadezda Petrusenko have found that Swedish recycling policies, in opposition to what this paper shows for Denmark, never presented controversy and instead developed in a dynamic interplay between scrap firms, manufacturing companies, and municipalities with government regulation as a driver. They have called for historical research to explore why the level of material recirculation differs between countries.Footnote 21
This study of the Can War offers a historical explanation of the high Danish return rate and contributes to a broader geography by focusing on the clash between national and European interests and legal frameworks during the formative years of environmental politics. Additionally, the study adds to research emphasizing the polyphony of voices within and between trades. Robert Friedel has criticized Elmore for oversimplifying the role of large businesses. In his study of the American beverage container system, Friedel highlights a plurality of actors, conflicting concerns, a mix of motives and agendas, and uncertainty about outcomes. He points to the rise of self-service supermarkets and chain stores as changes that favored single-use packaging, as they “sought to avoid the labor, space, and administrative costs of refillables.” Friedel interprets the shift to single-use containers as “a confluence of changing retail practices, promotions by materials and container manufacturers, and the construction of new ideas about so-called convenience among consumers.” He contrasts this with “those who see the triumph of nonreturnables as the product simply of new technologies or the choices of large corporations.”
The last sentence could be read as a critique of Elmore’s emphasis on the interests of Coca-Cola and perhaps of Finn Arne Jørgensen, who centers the reverse vending machines produced at the Norwegian company Tomra in his study of beverage container recycling systems. According to Friedel, technology was relevant but not determinative.Footnote 22 However, Jørgensen convincingly shows the importance of technology when he notes that the reverse vending machines, despite their persuasive anonymity, were not merely simple technologies in grocery stores; rather, they were the front end of a large technological system that shaped the actions of billions of consumers.Footnote 23 In the same vein, Elizabeth Shove has shown that even a dustbin can be “a mediator of changing waste practices.”Footnote 24 Furthermore, in the Can War, the reverse vending machines proved to be among the ordinary objects that Shove has deemed “extraordinarily important in sustaining and transforming the details and design of everyday life.”Footnote 25 They became pivotal for changes in the Danish recycling system, enabling a return system with various types of beverage containers instead of a few standard bottles.
The above-mentioned authors all provide insightful and complex stories of recycling systems, with Friedel and Elmore focusing on the United States and Jørgensen on Norway. However, as the exceptional case with a can ban in action for decades, Denmark offers insight into a different political landscape and other possible choices with historical roots and long-term consequences. It offers particular insights into how recycling and, more broadly, environmentalism became a battleground in the EU system.
Case Presentation: The Can War
The historical case study of the Can War is based on sources from the Ministry of the Environment archives at the Danish National Archives, newspapers, parliamentary proceedings, and online EEC/EU material. It is not based on company archives, and thus it cannot cover how the companies involved argued internally and calculated the economics. It is a study of arguments used in public and correspondence with public authorities.
Although based on texts and focused on business interests, the study aims to take materials seriously, and thus, the case presentation begins with aluminum. Timothy LeCain has called modern humans a metallic species,Footnote 26 and aluminum was increasingly used during the twentieth century for construction, transportation, and packaging.Footnote 27 Thus, it went from being an undiscovered chemical element in the Earth’s crust two centuries ago to becoming central to modern life. In nature, aluminum does not exist in pure form, but in 1825, H.C. Ørsted presented the first lump of slightly impure aluminum. In 1855, the material was showcased as a new wonder material at the world exhibition, but it remained too expensive for common use prior to the development of new production methods. Thereafter, it evolved from a material used for jewelry into one that was useful for single-use packaging.Footnote 28
Steel beverage cans were marketed in the 1930s, while aluminum cans were introduced in Hawaii in 1958. Two years later, the first steel can with an aluminum lid was advertised as a soft-top container that was easy to open. In the United States, aluminum cans replaced steel cans for beer in the late 1960s, and generally, aluminum became a significant part of the waste stream, with its reputation connected to trash and littering.Footnote 29 Thus, by the beginning of the 1970s, the aluminum industry began to consider recycling essential for the long-term acceptance of cans and started feeding the debate about littering, shifting the responsibility for pollution to the consumer. In this way, used beverage containers became a vehicle for promoting recycling efforts.Footnote 30 Still, despite the recyclability of aluminum cans, the activist Annie Leonard has called their use absurd. In 2010, she suggested using the aluminum in circulation as cans for better purposes, for example, to replace some steel in transportation to reduce carbon emissions by lightening vehicles.Footnote 31 However, compared with plastic, another modern and environmentally problematic material used for single-use beverage containers, aluminum has been less debated.
This paper focuses on the aluminum can and not its plastic competitor, despite the latter’s importance for environmental issues, because polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles were not prevalent in the can-ban debate. As beverage containers, they were simply not a serious competitor to glass bottles and metal cans before the 1980s, and even then, they were mostly used for soft drinks. In the Danish Environment Ministry, PET bottles were discussed starting around 1983.Footnote 32
The 1970s Can Discussion
In Denmark, the major brewery Carlsberg experimented with steel cans starting in 1936 but stopped due to World War II. When the brewery began producing canned beer in 1954, it was only for export.Footnote 33 Instead, the small, provincial brewery Faxe, a nonmember of the Danish Brewers’ Association, which Carlsberg dominated, introduced steel cans to the home market in 1970. At the time, Denmark had a well-functioning return system for refillable glass bottles; it was based on a standard beer bottle developed around 1890 and redesigned in 1949, and a deposit system that the brewers had introduced in 1942. In 1976, Faxe also disrupted the system by introducing a special glass bottle, and more special bottles followed, causing sorting problems that displeased retailers. However, in 1983, standard beer bottles produced at the Danish glasswork Holmegaard accounted for ninety-six percent of the Danish market for beer containers.Footnote 34 This situation was very different from the United States, where canned beer had surpassed the sale of beer in glass bottles by the end of the 1960s, and beer in returnable bottles mostly went to restaurants.Footnote 35
A 1974 flow chart similar to the one in Figure 1 describes how the Danish deposit and return system worked. When customers returned empty bottles, in almost half of the shops, they simply reported the number of bottles to receive their deposit back. In the remaining shops, employees were involved in the counting. Brewers picked up the empty bottles from the retailers, transporting them back to the breweries to be cleaned and reused. The retailers paid a deposit to the brewers, but according to a small survey, one in ten retailers did not ask customers for a deposit, and one in ten only demanded a deposit from customers who were unknown to them.Footnote 36
The Danish production and return system for beverage containers (glass bottles) in the early 1970s.
Source: Rasmussen et al.,” Rapport over det indenlandske kredsløb for øl-og mineralvandsemballage.”
When Faxe introduced beer cans in 1970, a litter debate had gained momentum, and the same year, Coca-Cola was forced to stop using a single-use glass bottle in Denmark. This was because retailers had promised authorities that they would forgo single-use glass bottles in return for avoiding a ban.Footnote 37 Denmark has a long tradition of involving interest organizations in the political process, and the agreement mirrored this tradition.Footnote 38 The following year, the parliament passed an enabling act, opening the possibility of later intervention against beverage cans to prevent health risks, pollution, and waste management disadvantages.Footnote 39 At the time, packaging waste constituted approximately one-third of common household waste, and the amount of packaging waste was expected to rise.Footnote 40 The new law was a consequence of a media debate in the summer of 1970, which was kick-started by an announcement from the Danish Brewers’ Association that its members would soon sell canned beer in Denmark. The major brewers had discovered that Faxe had invested in a used Swedish canning unit and was preparing to introduce steel cans. The small brewer claimed that retailers wished to eliminate the work associated with handling empty bottles, and customers wanted cans due to the rising popularity of outdoor activities such as camping. Yet, it was not simply a matter of retailers and consumers craving convenience. For Faxe—as a small brewer in a market dominated by major players—it was a way to stand out and strengthen their brand, and consequently their sales and market position. However, such economic arguments were not aired in public. Instead, Faxe stated that they invested in canning facilities because they expected Denmark to become part of the common European market. Consequently, foreign brewers would start selling canned beer in Denmark, and Faxe wished to prepare for this competition. Moreover, Faxe claimed that they did not expect large sales of the more expensive packaging, hoping to downplay worries about litter. The Danish Brewers’ Association explained that they could not stand idly by upon hearing rumors of nonmembers’ canned beer plans and foreign brewers’ export plans. Establishing production facilities took time, so the brewers decided to introduce canned beer domestically, despite current worries over single-use packaging.Footnote 41
A newspaper framed the 1970 media debate as a race. Who would come in first? Are the major brewers placing orders at the only factory producing beer cans in Denmark? The tin can producer Haustrup, which has been Swedish-owned since 1969 as part of PLM (a Swedish packaging company named AB Plåtmanufaktur until the 1970s)?Footnote 42 Or politicians who wanted to limit single-use containers made of glass and metal? Haustrup pointed to Sweden, where canned beer already had a major market share, and claimed that glass bottles were becoming single-use containers, as well. In their eyes, the way to avoid increasing waste and litter was not a ban; it was to fight users’ mentality.Footnote 43 Thus, they resembled the American can producers in blaming users for littering and saw it as a matter of educating consumers. The Danish Minister of the Interior announced that legislation would be proposed after the Parliament’s summer break, but despite the prospect of a ban, Faxe proceeded. The other brewers prepared to follow, although they had previously found that Danes’ drinking habits showed no need for canned beer, and customers were unlikely to accept the higher price.Footnote 44 The trade minister asked the brewers to wait for a political decision, and the Danish Brewers’ Association agreed, but their promise only lasted until Swedish brewers announced that they would start selling canned beer in Denmark.Footnote 45 Therefore, in November 1970, a newspaper reported that five Danish canned beers and one Swedish beer were for sale in Denmark.Footnote 46
Canned beer on grocery store shelves did not stop the political discussions, nor did complaints over the possibility of a ban from the British Ministry of Commerce, the Swedish Industrial Association, the Danish metal packaging producers, and the retail trade council—thus, from bodies representing the interests of foreign brewers, the metal packaging industry, and retailers tired of handling empty bottles. Officially, the major Danish brewers did not argue for a ban, but others noted that it would help them avoid foreign competition in the home market, and they highlighted the brewers’ economic interests in the glass industry.Footnote 47 However, in a later debate over soft drink packaging, the Danish Brewer’s Association claimed that they did not fear foreign competition, but rather additional taxes on already heavily taxed beer and soft drinks.Footnote 48
In the following years, the market share of canned beer increased to two percent, raising the consumption of canned beer to five per inhabitant per year in Denmark, compared with forty in Sweden and ninety in the United States. In 1973, Faxe had ninety-four percent of the domestic canned beer market, but only approximately four percent of the total beer sales. However, the sale of canned beer increased so rapidly that, in August 1973, the Danish Brewers’ Association told a newspaper that they expected canned beer to comprise a considerable part of beer sales in a few years if nothing was done. Consumers had become interested, and the brewers foresaw that they would have to ration sales and thus benefit foreign competitors if they did not increase production.Footnote 49 This restarted the can-ban debate. As part of the renewed discussion, the environmental organization Miljø-forum (Environment-forum) argued for a ban. In their view, one problem was the aesthetic pollution from cans; another was the lack of reusability and poor recyclability because the coating of the steel cans lowered the quality of the melted steel. Thus, Miljø-forum claimed that the worth of a beer can fell to zero after one use, while the worth of refillable glass bottles fell only three to four percent. Miljø-forum also compared the use of energy and found that beer cans had significant disadvantages in terms of energy, and thus economically. According to their calculations, a shift from refillable glass bottles to steel cans would increase the price of the packaging from 0.6 to sixteen percent of the price of a beer.Footnote 50 Another calculation from 1975 showed that the production and distribution costs of beer cans were one and a half times those of refillable glass bottles. For the can, the material itself accounted for seventy-one percent of the total cost, while for the latter, it was only three percent.Footnote 51 This made the price of the material highly important, and while, overall, the price of steel had increased since the 1920s, the price of aluminum had stabilized at a relatively low point in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 52 This made the material more appealing for single-use containers.
Haustrup, which produced the steel cans that Faxe used, also engaged in lobbying. The Danish meat industry was their largest customer, but in 1973, beer cans comprised one-fourth of their total metal packaging production in Denmark. Haustrup argued that a can ban would negatively influence beer exports, that cans were good for users, that the litter problem was small in Denmark because ninety-five percent of all beer was consumed at home, that the Danish Brewers’ Association’s prognosis for the future sale of canned beer was exaggerated, and that renovation and recirculation problems would soon be solved. They also stated that a change from returnable glass bottles to disposable metal cans would make retailers less dependent on beer suppliers, reduce their time spent handling beverage containers by forty percent, and save half of their storage space. Retailers’ time studies of bottle and can handling in supermarkets in 1970 indicated that retailers’ costs related to handling and storage would decrease even more.
Haustrup also referred to an opinion poll from 1973 showing that thirty percent of consumers found the price difference between beer in bottles and cans fair. The same poll showed that their arguments for using cans were beer taste (Faxe sold draft beer in cans), size (forty-five instead of thirty-three cl of beer), convenience for outdoor activities (easy transport for excursions, camping, and boat trips), the lack of bottle accounts at retailers, fanciness and the charm of novelty, sturdiness, and their practicality in the refrigerator. In a brochure called Facts about Littering Nature, Haustrup claimed that humans, not objects, pollute. They referred to American surveys showing that the reasons for polluting were laziness and thoughtlessness, the lack of a sense of responsibility, a lack of trash cans, the ineffectual use of laws and regulations, and weak reactions from the public against those littering. Behind those matters was a new lifestyle. In accordance with this view, Haustrup, like PLM in Sweden, began promoting reuse and became involved in preventive education about littering, such as “keep clean” campaigns. In 1974, they were also involved in forming the company Gendan, whose purpose was to promote reuse. However, Haustrup soon stopped producing steel cans for beer. This was not because of the can-ban debate, but rather because PLM prioritized modern aluminum cans produced at a new Swedish production facility.Footnote 53
The supermarket chain Irma, with three percent of the domestic canned beer market in 1973, also lobbied against a can ban. Irma sold Swedish canned beer and canned cola, and the retailer asked why beverage cans should be banned when no other kinds of packaging were. In advertisements, Irma claimed that empty bottles were a problem for customers carrying them to the shop and for retailers handling their return. Irma preferred cans despite knowing they were “hardly in agreement with the nature conservation people and the minister of pollution control.” They pointed to the problem with cuts from glass fragments and found bottles no more attractive than cans. They also claimed that the latter would disappear due to corrosion. Irma also pointed to Sweden and the United States, where customers could decide for themselves instead of being forced to use glass bottles. In addition, Irma asked for an independent expert survey questioning whether beverage cans were more environmentally problematic than food cans. Irma’s advertisements sparked debate, and a few weeks later, the brewers voluntarily agreed to limit canned beer production if retailers promised to limit imports.Footnote 54
What had happened was that a new environmental minister, using the 1971 legislation as a lever, had presented the brewers with a choice of a prohibitive tax like one planned in Norway, a ban on cans, or a voluntary agreement to ensure that the market share of canned beer stayed limited.Footnote 55 The brewers chose the last of these options, and when the agreement was renegotiated in 1975, the brewers agreed to phase out sales in five years.Footnote 56 Thus, in 1981, an executive order mandated that beer and soft drink containers should be returnable starting in 1982.Footnote 57 With a return system designed for refillable glass bottles, this was effectively a ban on metal cans, and thus, steel and aluminum cans had become matter out of place, not just as litter in natural environments, but also in the Danish return system. Canned beer was sold in Denmark from 1970 to 1981, but refillable glass bottles had a market share of ninety-seven percent for beer and ninety-nine percent for soft drinks.Footnote 58 In 1977, the sale of soft drinks in cans was stopped with an executive order that prompted can producers to complain to the EEC. In response, the commission only asked for further details.Footnote 59
Faxe, having most of the canned beer home market, claimed that the complete ban forced them to lay off workers and that they would lose brand value connected to canned draft beer. They noted the possibility of recycling aluminum cans, even presenting a Swedish-inspired idea for a recycling system for the environmental ministry. In Sweden, steel cans had been on the market for more than a decade, and in 1982, aluminum cans were also accepted when new legislation introduced a compulsory return system. The system was run by a new company, Returpack AB (today, often called Pantamera), which was jointly owned by the Swedish Brewers’ Association and PLM, which produced the beer cans. The Swedish goal was a seventy-five percent return rate, and a deposit system that extended to supermarkets, smaller retailers, and gasoline stations.Footnote 60 Sweden already had a voluntary deposit system for glass bottles, so with the new legislation, it had two systems. One was the compulsory deposit system in which Returpack handled metal, single-use beverage containers starting in 1984. In 1994, it was extended to include single-use plastic containers (PET bottles). With this system, Sweden became the first European country to introduce a compulsory deposit and recycling system including single-use aluminum beverage containers. The other system was an old, voluntary deposit system in which the Swedish Brewers’ Association handled refillable bottles—initially only glass bottles, but later plastic bottles, as well. Just like in Denmark, this approach was originally based on a standard glass bottle from the late 1800s and an old deposit system that the brewers ran.Footnote 61
The First Court Case
Denmark became an EEC member in 1973, and negotiations with the EEC commissioner about whether the Danish could ban violated the community’s free trade rules started in 1980, even before the executive order formally introduced the ban.Footnote 62 In 1984, no agreement had emerged in the negotiations, and the commission took the opening step towards a court case for infringement on free trade. Specifically, the EEC criticized the ban on metal cans for beverages, the limitations on beer and soft drink sales in unauthorized containers, and recycling as a prerequisite for the marketing of beer and soft drinks. Thus, in 1986, the EEC Commission brought a case against Denmark at the Court of Justice of the European Communities for failing “to fulfill its obligations under Article 30 of the EEC Treaty.”Footnote 63 The case material explained that foreign producers of beverages and containers and associations representing the retail trade had submitted complaints “on the grounds that in practice the legislation prevents the importation into Denmark of foreign beer and soft drinks in their original containers because of the associated administrative difficulties as well as the costs involved for importers in establishing a collection system as prescribed.” A public relations company connected to Faxe initiated these complaints, sending a fax to foreign brewers and packaging producers to encourage them to complain to the EEC.Footnote 64
Foreign competitors claimed that the ban was technically a trade barrier that helped the brewery Carlsberg, and it was found that the sincerity of Denmark’s ecological concerns could be doubted because Denmark had “not considered it necessary to fix a maximum level of protection for the environment in relation to containers of products such as milk and wine”—products that were not subject to competition between domestic and foreign producers. The wine bottles were part of a voluntary collection system that, according to the EEC, ensured the satisfactory protection of the environment.Footnote 65 In addition, the EEC criticized Denmark’s export of canned beer when the ban stopped imports. In 1985, this argument was supported by the Danish right-wing Progress Party, which claimed that Denmark had double standards when accepting exports but not domestic sales, and thus, they proposed a removal of the ban. They argued that it was comical to forbid canned beer while allowing canned food for dogs and cats.Footnote 66 However, even the retailers now considered cans a nuisance and defended the ban. As one explained, Denmark had implemented a recycling law so that cans would come with a deposit system and should be returned through the shops. If they were forced to receive empty beer cans, the retailers feared that they would also be forced to accept cans from canned food, and they had no interest in handling dirty packaging. If Denmark lost the EEC court case, the retailers wanted the municipalities to bear the burden and extra costs of collecting used beverage containers. Investment in reverse vending machines and implementing a deposit system was costly.Footnote 67
For the Commission, this was a test case to establish “whether and to what extent the concern to protect the environment has precedence over the principle of a common market without frontiers.” The Commission saw a risk of member states taking refuge behind ecological arguments. It questioned the proportionality of the Danish rules, but not whether environmental protection was an essential objective for the EEC.Footnote 68 The EEC found that “measures intended to achieve extremely high [environmental] aims must be regarded as a means of arbitrary discrimination or a disguised restriction on trade.” That Denmark had a system in which ninety-nine percent of beverage containers were reused was “beyond the objective which the Community seeks.” In opposition, Denmark found that the ban was “justified by legitimate concern to protect the environment in general and to conserve resources in particular as well as the desire to reduce the amount of waste.” As Denmark argued, the Commission had already recognized that the “protection of the environment may have priority over the free movement of goods.”Footnote 69 The commission was supported by the United Kingdom (UK), which argued that a ban on a certain type of waste from certain products constituted arbitrary discrimination. The British interest was to eliminate the imbalance in beer exports and imports between Denmark and the UK.
In 1988, the Court determined that the can ban did in fact violate the free movement of goods rules but found it acceptable for environmental reasons.Footnote 70 Denmark could keep both the ban and the deposit and return system but was forced to include more types of glass bottles. While retailers only accepted the kinds of bottles they sold, the system became more bothersome and laborious for both consumers and retailers. The number of glass bottle types in the system had already risen to eighteen, and some were not collected to be refilled; instead, they were sold as glass fragments to the glassworks.
In the EEC, the verdict was an important decision regarding the scope of admissible exceptions to Article 30 in the Treaty. The Treaty allowed several acceptable reasons for infringements—for example, regarding public security and health (Article 36)—and, in different ways, member states had tried to use those exemptions to create obstacles to free trade. However, environmental protection had first become part of the Treaty in 1987, and the ruling in the Danish case was the first time that the Court accepted environmental protection as a legitimate exception and ruled based on the principle that both environmental protection and free trade were EEC objectives and should be treated as equally important.Footnote 71 At the same time, the verdict demonstrated that national environmental actions often de facto constituted trade barriers, and that the proportionality and balance between the two goals, environmental protection and free trade, were matters of interpretation and debate, with the Commission favoring a stricter interpretation than environmental progressive member states such as Denmark. The verdict revealed a definite limit regarding the extent to which a country could implement stricter environmental goals than those set by the EEC.Footnote 72
The Second Court Case
The Can War did not end with the verdict because a packaging directive was on the horizon. The partial acquittal of Denmark—probably a surprise for the Commission—shifted the fight against the Danish ban. It became a matter of the new directive’s wording. Generally, the packaging directive caused debate, and environmental organizations criticized it for not being extensive enough and for having poorly formulated objectives. The Danish environmental minister fought for formulations that allowed Denmark to keep the ban, but the European metal packaging industry lobbied against them. The minister lost, and Denmark, in vain, voted against the directive.Footnote 73 As its primary objective, the directive should prevent packaging waste, and secondarily, it should reduce waste by reuse, recycling, and other forms of recovering packaging waste. Its goal was “to harmonize national measures concerning the management of packaging and packaging waste in order, on the one hand, to prevent any impact thereof on the environment […] or to reduce such impact, thus providing a high level of environmental protection, and, on the other hand, to ensure the functioning of the internal market.”Footnote 74 The goals of harmonizing and avoiding obstacles to free trade meant that the member states could not employ stricter rules. Therefore, the ban became problematic when the packaging directive was enforced in 1996.Footnote 75
The Danish environmental minister, the Social Democrat Svend Auken, argued that Denmark’s well-developed deposit and return system for bottles was the most environmentally friendly in the world. Thus, the Danish government would not allow changes that increased the environmental impact and reduced the return rate.Footnote 76 Others emphasized that the Swedish recycling system already included cans,Footnote 77 and many Danes now found Auken too stubborn. Right-wing politicians fought the ban along with the retailers because the proliferation of bottle types in the deposit and return system, a consequence of the first court case, had made handling empty beverage containers a greater impediment.Footnote 78 Faced with strong opposition, Auken was ready to accept aluminum cans if steel cans could still be banned,Footnote 79 but nothing came from the continued negotiations with what had become the EU and its Commissioner for the Environment, another Danish Social Democrat.
In the discussion of the environmental superiority of the Danish return system, life-cycle assessments (LCA) became a central weapon to measure and compare the environmental impact of products from cradle to grave. Coca-Cola first employed this method in the late 1960s, but the company never shared the result.Footnote 80 However, in 1974, a US Environmental Protection Agency study comparing the environmental impact of different kinds of beverage containers showed that returnable glass bottles had lower resource and environmental effects than single-use containers of glass, steel, or aluminum,Footnote 81 and in the long run, LCA analyses of different types of packaging became boundary objects that engaged both sides in the environmental debate.Footnote 82 Today, LCA is a refined method based on extensive databases, but in the 1990s, it was a contested method in the making.Footnote 83 Still, an EU directive from 1994 stated that “life-cycle assessments should be completed as soon as possible to justify a clear hierarchy between reusable, recyclable and recoverable packaging.”Footnote 84 In 1995, the Danish Environmental Protection Agency published an LCA report comparing the environmental impact of different kinds of beverage containers. The report emphasized the long tradition of refillable bottles with a return rate above ninety-eight percent, with each glass bottle refilled, on average, more than 30 times.Footnote 85 In reply, the European metal packaging industry pointed to defects in the report,Footnote 86 and acknowledging these deficiencies, the Danish Environmental Protection Agency published a new report in 1998. It concluded that “the differences in potential global warming, photochemical ozone formation, acidification, and nutrient enrichment […] are not significant” when comparing refillable glass bottles and aluminum cans. However, the electricity demand was higher for aluminum cans than for refillable glass bottles.Footnote 87
The report made no difference to the EU, and a new court case soon began. This was never settled because a new environmental minister lifted the can ban in 2002, before a ruling was announced.Footnote 88 It was then broadly acknowledged that Denmark would lose, and the battle against metal cans had become closely linked to Auken as a progressive, but also stubborn, environmental minister. The long historical roots of the Can War had been forgotten, and many perceived it as more or less the increasingly isolated minister’s personal fight. When the Social Democrats lost an election in November 2001, the liberal party Venstre and the Conservative Party formed a minority government based on the votes from a right-wing party. Thereby, the ban antagonists came into power.
As a final issue, a question was raised regarding whether a planned expansion of the deposit system would pay. This discussion was initiated by the Environmental Assessment Institute (Institut for Miljøvurdering), which the political scientist Bjørn Lomborg managed; he was famous for using economic arguments in a fierce fight against environmentalism.Footnote 89 The institute found that it was cheaper to treat aluminum cans as disposable packaging.Footnote 90 However, the environmental authorities and the incineration plants protested because aluminum cans thrown in the trash end up as slag, causing operating stops in incinerators.Footnote 91
Meanwhile, for years, the brewers had prepared a modernized return system that could include cans. In 1996, along with retailers, they had initiated an analysis of bottle handling, and, based on this work, the brewers and retailers formed the nonprofit organization Danish Return System Ltd. (Dansk Retursystem A/S) in 2000, which operated voluntarily. Based on new legislation introducing a mandatory deposit and return system, the organization was granted a monopoly in 2001, and today, it is once again claimed that Denmark has a world-leading return system, with a ninety-two percent return rate for the single-use containers that dominate the system.Footnote 92 Compared with the 1970s, the new system could handle many kinds of beverage containers, including single-use containers, with a deposit. It also included modernized reverse vending machines paid for and installed by Danish Return System in the largest retail stores, and these handled around seventy-five percent of the returned containers.Footnote 93
Since then, the brewers have owned and controlled the Danish Return System. Its first board members were a lawyer, three managers from the largest supermarket chains, three from Carlsberg, three from other Danish brewers, and one from a Danish Coca-Cola bottler. The stated goal was to protect the environment and uphold high return percentages, which would be achieved by minimizing the expenses connected to the retailers’ handling of refillable bottles and by establishing a deposit and return system for single-use beverage containers. An important part of the new system was efficiency at the retailers, combined with a payment for their work sorting empty beverage containers. This payment was financed by a compulsory fee that all beverage producers paid. To encourage as many retailers as possible to join the system, it was marketed with the argument that they could now earn from their work with empty bottles. Customers returned the empty packaging to the shops, and from there, trucks from the Danish Return System collected it. The standard glass bottles were returned to the brewers to be rinsed and refilled, while the rest of the packaging materials were sorted and sold as scrap to be recycled to the greatest extent possible.Footnote 94
In both Denmark and Sweden, refillable glass bottles slowly lost ground. According to an EU report, the Swedish reuse system for beer bottles had already reached a marginal market position with twenty-seven percent in 1997, while refillable bottles still held a market share of sixty percent for soft drinks due to the recent popularity of reusable 1.5-liter PET bottles. According to the report, the decline of the reuse system began in the mid-1970s, when cans entered the market. In 1979, reusable glass bottles had a market share of forty-six percent, which has steadily declined since.Footnote 95 Denmark saw the same development after the introduction of aluminum cans, and in 2022, the market share of refillable packaging for beer and soft drinks sold in retail had decreased to seven percent.Footnote 96
A Plethora of Economic and Environmental Arguments
The Can War, as outlined above, was not a simple story of economic versus environmental arguments or a simple dichotomy with businesses in opposition to nature lovers. The Danish brewers’ interests were of the utmost importance, but they shifted over time, and the brewers were not the only businesses to influence the turn of events. Thus, the story confirms Friedel’s conclusion of shifting arguments, many uncertainties, and imagined futures. For example, guesses regarding future consumer habits and return rates were important for environmental impact comparisons.
Table 1 summarizes many of the arguments advanced during the long Can War. The table does not address the importance, truth value, proponents, or sincerity of the arguments; rather, it shows a plethora of environmental and economic arguments both for and against a ban.Footnote 97 Among the recurrent economic arguments were investment and domestic workplace arguments, international competitiveness, compliance with international free trade rules, production and transportation costs, time use and other expenses at retailers, and waste-handling expenses. Such economic arguments had priority, but many could be adapted to either support or oppose a ban, and thus, they did not always oppose environmentalism. The environmental arguments addressed littering and resource issues, a fear of consumers developing a “throwaway mentality,” and discussions of the environmental benefits of the current return system. There was also discussion regarding whether beverage cans should be perceived as an environmental problem at all and why they should be treated differently from food cans and wine bottles.
Arguments that businesses, interest organizations, and politicians advanced.Footnote 98
Brewers, packaging producers, and retailers had economic interests and were the most active lobbyists, but others were active debaters, as well: the EEC/EU, labor unions, environmentalist organizations, different ministries, local politicians from areas with affected industries, municipalities, and waste handlers. However, organizations representing consumers seemed rather uninterested, and both consumer convenience arguments and the liberal, “consumers must decide” arguments came from businesses such as Faxe and Irma. The convenience arguments mostly concerned weight lifting heavy glass bottles versus light cans, and the inconvenience of bringing empty beverage containers to retailers instead of depositing them in the trash.Footnote 99 Despite the rapid success of cans in other countries, there seems to have been no consumer desire for cans; rather, it was retailers who wanted to eliminate the inconvenient work of handling returned glass bottles and deposits.
Over time, there was a shift in the main arguments and themes in the debate. In the 1970s, the theme of littering was central. Littering and increased waste from packaging were the main concerns, and arguments about changing lifestyles and rising wealth were advanced to explain the change, including a shift in gender roles. In the 1980s, the focus of the debate shifted and simplified into a dichotomy of free trade versus environmental concerns. Thus, the dominant argument became that the ban illegally protected Danish brewers, that is, that it was a trade barrier in disguise. However, in the 1990s, the major brewers’ interests had shifted, broad political support had disappeared, and the environmental minister almost alone advocated for a ban, still viewing Denmark as a forerunner in environmental protection in the EU. Thus, while studies of businesses’ influence on environmental politics generally claim that environmental concerns mattered more in the 1990s than in the 1980s, in this case, the opposite was true. The 1988 EEC verdict allowed for environmental concerns to infringe on free trade, while in the 1990s, the seemingly environmentally friendly packaging directive became an obstacle to the Danish can ban. In this way, this study demonstrates the benefit of a closer examination of the formative years of environmental politics.
The major ban proponents and antagonists also shifted over time, as shown in Table 2. Thus, compared with studies focusing on one company or on seeing a branch of business as unified, this study of the Can War complicates matters. Businesses certainly influenced environmental politics, and they certainly put economic arguments and profit motives before environmentalism. However, this did not mean that they acted in unison, aggressively fighting environmentalism. Generally, there was a mix of business interests. While unsurprisingly, the can producers consistently fought the can ban, both retailers and brewers changed their position and did not necessarily act in unison within their sectors. Faxe and Irma both introduced canned beer to position themselves inside their trade and gain market share, not as part of a fight against environmentalism like the one that Lomborg later represented. Interests across sectors and national borders were also mixed. The major brewers had shares in the glass industry and thus interests in the packaging industry, as well, and as the case of Haustrup showed, national interests could be blurred. The Swedish-owned company used jobs in Denmark as an argument against the can ban but soon moved their production of beer cans to Sweden.
Ban proponents and antagonists.
In sum, the Can War was more a story of businesses adjusting to political opportunities than of opposition to environmentalism. It was not a case of crusading libertarian ideology, obstructionism, misinformation, or other ways of protesting environmentalism. The businesses involved used their political influence to their advantage but were generally pragmatic in their approach to environmentalism. Knowing future rules mattered more than the possibility of a ban, so that businesses could invest accordingly. In the short run, the major brewers could gain financially from a can ban because it would protect their home market, their interests in the glass industry, and their investments in bottles and facilities for rinsing and bottling. However, in the long run, they shifted positions and prioritized designing and controlling a new return system that included single-use packaging so that it matched their needs. Previously, Carlsberg had owned eighty-three percent of Holmegaard Glassworks, but at the same time that the brewers began planning the new return system, Holmegaard was sold to PLM. Thus, the major aluminum can producer became the owner of the producer of the Danish standard beer bottle in 1998.Footnote 100
If the brewers’ aim throughout was to remain strong in their home market, they certainly succeeded. Regarding beer sales in Denmark, around 2020, Carlsberg was still the market leader with more than half of the home market, followed by Royal Unibrew, to which Faxe had long belonged, with a quarter of the domestic beer market. In addition, the Danish brewers remained competitive abroad, exporting half of the beer produced in Denmark to foreign markets.Footnote 101
The Winner of the Can War: Aluminum
The beverage containers themselves also changed during the Can War. While the standardized beer bottle remained stable, steel cans mostly disappeared, PET bottles became a new competitor, and aluminum cans became ever thinner and lighter due to the continual development of aluminum. Thus, the aluminum cans became more environmentally friendly compared with heavy glass bottles.
The competition among glass, steel, and aluminum, as beverage container materials, was important for the return systems, and Friedel has found that this competition drove down container costs.Footnote 102 However, it was more than a matter of economics; although the price of steel and aluminum decreased during the long Can War,Footnote 103 and the energy crises of the 1970s increased the price of energy and thus the production price of glass bottles. It was also a matter of different material properties. Studying plastic objects in seawater, Max Liboiron has shown that the physical characteristics of different materials—density, molecular bonds, and other properties—are decisive for their role as pollutants.Footnote 104 Similarly, it mattered whether glass, steel, or aluminum ended up in the waste stream, whether as litter in nature, as feed for incinerators, or when collected for recycling.
Friedel has claimed that the older practices of reusing glass bottles were “far kinder to the environment” than single-use cans, Footnote 106 but Table 3 shows how the different materials’ properties were used as arguments both for and against their use as beverage containers. In the 1970s, when the litter problem was at the core of the beverage container discussion, the biodegradability (corrosion) of steel cans was claimed to be an environmental advantage compared with the permanence of glass bottles. When the more corrosion-resistant aluminum took over, biodegradability disappeared as an argument, and today, it seems strange to assert that steel cans are biodegradable, particularly because they were coated to resist the effect of the liquid, and aluminum lids were soon added for easy opening. Such mixes of materials complicate recycling procedures.
Arguments related to materials in the Can War.Footnote 105
Other developments that influenced the beverage container return systems included changes in retail, with increased self-service, centralization, and rationalization. The first Danish hypermarket, Bilka, opened the same year that Faxe sold its first canned beer. Such changes made the old return system obsolete, as it was based on the high involvement of shop employees and a high level of trust in customers’ self-reporting the number of returned bottles. However, in 1974, a Danish magazine for engineers informed readers about Tomra’s reverse vending machines, which could automatically sort bottles and give customers a receipt.Footnote 107 Such advancements in recycling technologies made it possible to redesign the return system to efficiently include beverage containers of many shapes and materials. At the same time, the centralization of retail made investment in reverse vending machines more feasible. Thus, the other container revolution happened as part of immense changes in both shopping and waste practices at a time when waste-sorting systems became more advanced, and landfills, once a usual way of managing waste, became unacceptable.Footnote 108
While those changes generally benefited the aluminum can in the competition between beverage container materials, a material factor that mattered in favor of a system without cans was the existing rinsing and bottling facilities, which had been designed for the standard bottle. Together with the bottle itself, those facilities were physical manifestations of a system optimized over a long period, and they represented significant investments. Thus, they demonstrated an important feature of the large technological systems that are key to modern recycling, namely, that they bring past decisions and habits into the present.Footnote 109 As Bjørnar Olsen has written, the “past is not left behind, but patiently gathers and folds into what we conveniently term the present.”Footnote 110
In the end, neither the Danish standard bottle, used on average more than thirty times, nor Haustrup’s steel container could beat the light aluminum container, which could transport some of its environmental costs to public and private clean-up efforts and incinerator operators. Retailers had hoped that cans would become single-use packaging thrown in the trash and thus be the municipalities’ problem, but this did not happen in Denmark, where advanced vending machines that the brewers funded made it manageable to include aluminum cans in the return system. In the competition between container materials, the more advanced machines helped aluminum by compensating for its downsides: that thin aluminum is easily bent out of shape and is undesirable in household waste because it leaves nonmagnetic slag in incinerators. Thus, together with the EU packaging directive, the machines helped aluminum win the Can War regarding beer cans. Regarding soft drinks, the material shared the throne with PET bottles.
A Complex Network of Actors and Connections
This study of the Can War demonstrates how aluminum cans for beverages went from being a matter out of place to part of everyday life as a result of a complex network of actors and connections. This involved competing container materials, reverse vending machines, old return systems and habits, a common market built on free trade ideas, a strong brewing sector, packaging producers, retailers, and much more. Thus, the Can War was not simply a conflict over a trade barrier in disguise. It was also about material properties and about who should bear the waste management costs that accompanied the increased use of disposable packaging. Along with protecting investments and other economic interests, it was a practical matter and a question of defining environmental friendliness. When aluminum cans entered the Danish recycling system for beverage containers, it changed from a system based on reuse to one based on recycling. However, whether this made the system more or less environmentally friendly is less clear. It was difficult to measure environmental friendliness, as the debate over life cycle assessments showed. In addition, it could be difficult to determine whether a seemingly environmentally friendly initiative was sincere, as the aluminum industry’s involvement in “keep clean” campaigns and the story of the EU packaging directive showed.
When we focus on businesses’ influence on environmental politics in the zone between national and European legislation from 1970 to 2002, this study of the Can War shows how environmental concerns were entangled with other interests, predominantly national and economic ones. It also shows that both environmental and free trade arguments were used in pragmatic ways, demonstrating how businesses adapted to changing political and economic environments. The businesses involved in the Can War took positions for or against a can ban largely for practical or economic reasons rather than ideological ones, and they had no problem changing their positions. Thus, this study has illuminated different business reactions to environmentalism, and especially how the proportionality between the free movement of goods and the protection of the environment was up for debate in the EEC/EU system. A new European environmental politics challenged the idea of free trade at the core of the system, and the Danish case was used to test how far environmental protection should be allowed to infringe on free trade rules. In this way, it was a power struggle between a member state and the European Commission, and businesses took sides according to their interests.
With the comparison with Sweden, the study demonstrates how the composition of the domestic industry mattered for the design of the return system. The metal packaging producer PLM influenced the early Swedish adoption of aluminum cans, and Carlsberg similarly influenced the later Danish adoption. In both countries, old deposit systems run by the brewers had made customers accustomed to returning empty beverage containers, which retailers handled. These historical roots help explain why the two countries’ return rates stayed among the highest in the world.Footnote 111 In the end, the new return systems were both a product of newer environmental concerns, established consumer practices, technological developments, differences in national industrial composition, and shifting and competing business interests.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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