Calgary brewery's initiative helps prevent more than 30,000 beer can holders from landing in landfills

A unique recycling program, spearheaded by Calgary's Annex Ale Project, has helped prevent thousands of four-pack and six-pack beverage holders from going to waste.

CALGARY — A Calgary brewery has helped prevent tens of thousands of PakTechs, the plastic beer can holders, from ending up in landfills.

Annex Ale Project, located in the Brewery Belt in the city's southeast, launched its recycling program in March and has since put over 12,000 PakTechs back into use and recycled an additional 18,000.

"We’ve been working with the Alberta Small Brewers Association to set up consolidation and collection points all through the province to be able to collect the PakTech four and six-pack can holders," explained Andrew Bullied, Annex Ale Project's director of brewing ops.

"We are trying to make sure we take responsibility for all of the packaging that we are putting out into the world and trying to be as sustainable as possible."

Before the launch of the program, municipalities throughout Alberta had not been recycling the can holders made from 100 per cent recycled high-density polyethylene.

"This hasn’t really been done before," said Bullied. "We were seeing that the city couldn’t really handle these PakTech handles, so we decided to step up and take responsibility for our own packaging material and try and reuse as much as we possibly could."

There are over 32 locations across the province participating in the recycling effort, keeping PakTechs out of landfills and waste streams.

To participate, consumers can bring their can holders back to breweries, restaurants, retailers and bars throughout the province. All of the Paktechs that find their way into the designated bins are then brought to consolidaton points at breweries in Calgary, Edmonton or Lacombe for sorting for reuse or recycling.

For a map of collection locations in Alberta visit Annex Ales - PakTech