The figure that does not exist
Anyone wanting to know how many kegs a German brewery loses in a year finds nothing. No association, no authority, no study.
The Umweltbundesamt (German Environment Agency) regularly surveys how much beverage volume is sold in Germany in reusable packaging – and expressly excludes keg products. Its survey methodology states that fill sizes above ten litres and keg products are left out of account because they are used mainly in the commercial trade. For kegs, that statistic therefore holds neither cycle figures nor losses.
Every percentage figure on German keg loss you will come across is taken either from another region, from a model assumption or from the marketing of a tracking-system supplier.
Four countries, four figures, one pattern
Four statements are documented – with varying strength. None of them is an independent survey; all four come from associations or authorities and were passed on from there.
| Market | Figure | Origin | Strength of evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland | over 400,000 kegs stolen or gone missing since 2007 | Irish Brewers Association, presented in the Oireachtas during the debate on the scrap dealers bill | association figure, taken into a parliamentary record |
| United Kingdom | 400,000 kegs in 2007 | trade press, origin of the figure not stated | weak |
| USA | annual loss to the industry | Beer Institute estimate from 2007, passed on unchanged ever since – as far as Californian legislative materials | association estimate, never verified |
| USA (craft) | cost of losses per barrel of annual production, as a range | Brewers Association, from data supplied by member breweries | methodology not published |
The American range is worth a close look, because it is quoted most often. The Brewers Association defines it as the loss per barrel of draught beer production, but in the publication scales it up to total craft sales – bottles and cans included. That is inconsistent. And when it is passed on, almost always only the upper end of the range gets named, not the range itself. The order of magnitude is probably right; as a single value the figure is no use.
Why none of these figures turns into a rate
To get from “400,000 kegs gone missing” to “x per cent a year”, you would need the size of the national fleet in question. That is published nowhere – not for Ireland, not for the United Kingdom, not for Germany. Anyone quoting a percentage anyway has constructed it, not found it.
The only percentage figure we came across comes from a keg tracking supplier and is expressly marked in the text as that supplier's own estimate, with no method and no source. We do not list it as evidence.
Scrap as an incentive – and why it has grown weaker
A keg rarely disappears out of malice. It disappears because it is made of stainless steel and a scrap dealer will take it. So the question is how attractive that route is compared with proper return.
The Brewers Association made this calculation in 2013 and concluded that the scrap value of a keg is at least as high as the usual deposit, often higher. The recommendation that followed was to raise the deposit.
The scrap price for austenitic stainless steel is well below the 2013 level today. An empty 50-litre keg weighs around twelve kilograms; that gives a scrap value in the order of about one tenth of the price of a new keg and roughly one seventh to one eighth of the value of a reconditioned keg.
So the scrap value today is clearly below the usual deposit. Taking a keg to the scrap dealer is economically the worse deal compared with bringing it back – if you know where to bring it.
That is exactly the point. Keg loss is mostly not a theft problem but a problem of attribution: kegs whose owner nobody can identify any more, because the marking has weathered away, the publican has changed or the keg has passed through three intermediaries. They then stand in a cellar, in a yard, in a workshop – or, eventually, in the scrap container.
In the USA there is a reporting system for this: the American recycling industry association runs a free alert portal for metal theft. Police, recyclers and owners may file a report there – breweries included. A report goes out by email to every registered contact within a hundred miles, around 160 kilometres. There is no European counterpart.
That is why we are providing such a reporting function for our own keg identification and return: a registered keg reported as stolen carries that note in the database – visible to anyone who scans or queries it later.
The return rate is the real lever
There is one relationship you have to have seen once, because it decides the whole reusable debate. It is simple:
| Return rate per cycle | average cycles per container |
|---|---|
| 50 % | 2 |
| 70 % | 3 |
| 90 % | 10 |
| 95 % | 20 |
| 98 % | 50 |
| 99 % | 100 |
From 90 to 98 per cent is eight percentage points – and a factor of five in service life. Eunomia worked this pattern through in 2023 for Zero Waste Europe on reusable take-away packaging and puts it like this: even a small deviation in the return rate changes the overall result exponentially.
In fairness
That study is about cups and bowls, not kegs. The formula itself is independent of the format – it follows from probability theory, not from the container. Transferring it to kegs is nevertheless our analogy and not the statement of the study. We flag that, because it makes the difference between an argument and a piece of evidence.
What that does to the life-cycle assessment
Now it gets uncomfortable. The peer-reviewed life-cycle assessment by Martin and colleagues puts the point at which a steel keg comes out ecologically better than single-use plastic packaging at 38 uses; against plastic in a closed recycling loop at around 60. We have covered that in detail elsewhere.
Set the table above beside it and you get:
- At 98 per cent return a keg reaches 50 cycles on average. The first break-even point is clearly passed, the second almost.
- At 95 per cent it is 20 cycles. That puts the keg below both break-even points – ecologically it would not have paid off.
- At 90 per cent it is ten. That is the range in which a reusable system loses its own reason to exist.
That is why we do not run keg return as a service item but as the core of the matter. A keg that disappears from circulation after twelve fillings has never earned back the energy of its manufacture – however durable the stainless steel it is made of.
Our own assessment, expressly marked as such
How high the return rate actually is in the German draught beer business we do not know, and nobody we asked could document it. Our impression from refurbishment work: it is high in the closed brewery-to-pub relationship and drops exactly where intermediaries, a change of publican or export come into play. That is an observation, not a survey.
What a business can do with this
- Marking that survives the cycle. On the way back, a keg without legible owner marking is a found object with no address. Embossing and laser marking last, stickers do not.
- Know your loss points. Kegs do not disappear evenly, they disappear at particular handovers. Anyone who knows which ones those are in their own operation needs no tracking system to close them.
- Return other people's kegs instead of storing them. Somebody else's keg in your own store is a loss for the owner and a legal risk for you – a deposit transfers no ownership. How that works without trouble is covered in a separate article.
- Recondition instead of discarding. The most effective contribution to the number of cycles is not the extra cycle at the start but the departure avoided at the end.
A large keg manufacturer writes three things in its servicing white paper that argue against the obvious RFID solution: on aluminium kegs RFID is not recommended, because the adhesive does not hold permanently. Retrofitting a mixed fleet in full with UHF transponders is considered economically unviable. And the industry standard is still the permanently laser-engraved code, applied in the first maintenance cycle – cheap, usable on every keg type and independent of the reading technology.
That is a manufacturer's statement without a disclosed calculation, so it is not proof. But it comes from someone who sells radio solutions themselves – and it matches what businesses tell us. A code you read with a phone has one unbeatable advantage over a radio chip: it also works for the person who needs it only once a year.
What follows from this
There is still no Europe-wide reporting system for stolen or ownerless kegs. That is exactly the gap we are closing with our keg identification and return.
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Read on
How much of it is theft, what scrap value has to do with it, and why returning kegs honestly is penalised: Where the kegs end up