Environmental Politics, Business Interests, and the ‘Can War’: How Different Businesses Influenced the Danish Recycling System for Beverage Containers 1971-2003

Studies of corporate environmentalism often take an outset in case studies of individual corporations. Instead, this paper investigates changes in an infrastructural system for recycling beverage containers and asks the question: What role did different corporations play in that process? Concretely, it focuses on the Danish recycling system for beer and soft drink containers and the so-called ‘Can War’ between Denmark and the EU. A war that ended a 20-year-long Danish ban on metal cans for beverages and changed the system from one based on the reuse of glass bottles to one based on recycling. The ‘war’ had at its core a discussion about free trade contra environmentalism. It involved both the Danish breweries with different and changing standpoints, foreign breweries calling the ban a trade barrier, the metal can industry, and the retailers handling the returned containers in their back premises. When Denmark gave up the ban due to the prospect of a lost EU court case – and thereby changed a system they claimed to be world-leading – the breweries in collaboration with retailers had already a new company ready to run the future recycling system. A company that recently celebrated its 20th anniversary as a monopoly. By analysing the ‘Can War’ with a special focus on the role of businesses, my paper generally traces a complex set of business responses to environmentalism and complex relations to environmental politics and its material output in the form of changing infrastructural systems.