Through the collection of empty KeyKegs, environmentally focused UK beer distributor Jolly Good Beer aims to promote a circular economy in Hospitality. 

Jolly Good Beer – a coldchain distributor of independent craft beer, cider, and other beverages – is using honest, transparent communication to increase recycling and improve the flow of waste material in the industry. Besides distributing to independent pubs and bars across the Midlands, East and South East of England, it educates customers about the bigger environmental picture and the importance of handling sustainable plastics correctly.

KeyKegs are sustainable, designed-for-circularity kegs that, once empty, can be recycled into the actual raw materials used to produce new KeyKegs. Each month, Jolly Good Beer collects around 750 empty KeyKegs for recycling that may otherwise have ended up as landfill, although the company has said it aims to collect many more across the regions.

Part of the OneCircle recycling programme

The Jolly Good Beer team started collecting empty KeyKegs, in partnership with producer OneCircle, after local waste-management companies were unable to guarantee that circular materials are recycled correctly. 

Hospitality professionals across the UK – from Yorkshire to London, East Anglia to the West Midlands, and everywhere in between – can now help the environment by returning all their empty KeyKegs through Jolly Good Beer. The amount of recycled material in each new KeyKeg will also steadily increase as more empty Kegs are collected, thus protecting precious natural resources.

“Jolly Good Beer is proud to be a part of the OneCircle recycling programme, through which we can offer our customers a better service whilst contributing to the reduction of single-use plastic waste in our industry,” remarked Yvan Seth, Owner of Jolly Good Beer. “Through OneCircle we are sending tonnes of plastic Keg materials back to the manufacturer, to be made into more Kegs.”

Jolly Good Beer collects empty KeyKegs during deliveries, limiting the number of unnecessary journeys and reducing its carbon footprint. It then crushes and bundles the empty Kegs for OneCircle to collect. OneCircle shreds, separates and sorts the different plastics on an automatic recycling line to recover the raw materials. As much recycled material as possible is used to produce new KeyKeg parts, while the remainder is recycled for other uses.