"Selling Single Use: The Begrudging Acceptance and Environmental Consequences of Canned Beer in American Consumer Culture"

During the 1930s, the American brewing industry pioneered the world’s first single-use carbonated beverage containers. This paper explores how this now mundane technology used to market single servings of beer became ingrained in American consumer culture from the 1930s through the 1970s. In doing so, it discusses the social, political, and economic factors involved in the diffusion of technology, changing consumer tastes and preferences, and the roles corporations and the state play in these processes. I argue that canned beer was not the result of consumer demand for a new type of container. Rather, brewing corporations pushed the widespread adoption of canned beer from the top down because controlling how and where people drank single servings of their beer benefited their bottom line. This essay also argues that the transition from reusable glass bottles to canned beer brought considerable financial difficulty for small firms and posed environmental challenges for brewers of all sizes. This novel entanglement between beer and metal led to significant changes in American consumer culture and substantial impacts on global environments.