NOW: REPORTS
PIONEER SPIRIT How a Montana brewery is eliminating a quarter-million plastic bottles from Yellowstone BY SOPHIE TSAIRIS
The 19th century mining town of Philipsburg, Montana, about halfway between Butte and Missoula, is a place of exploration and ingenuity. Its pioneer spirit, reminiscent of the Old West and silver discovery in nearby Granite, still abounds, and entrepreneurs are adapting their businesses to create new and sustainable jobs that support the community. Nestled on a hill above P-burg, as locals call this town of just over 900 people, sits the Montana Silver Springs bottling facility. From the approaching dirt road the building looks like an unassuming warehouse, but beyond the garage doors a taproom and bottling line for both beer and water displays an atmosphere in vibrant contrast. Inside, NSYNC blasts on the radio, the type of music that one of the brewers claims “helps the yeast grow.” The place is animated with the smell of hops, the bustle of water bottling and the occasional rancher picking up spent grain to feed his cattle. Two stacks of aluminum bottles on pallets reach toward the high ceilings, one branded for Logjam Presents, the other for Yellowstone National Park. Just seven years ago, Nolan and Cathy Smith didn’t imagine themselves selling their product in the world’s first national park. The Smiths have been brewing and bottling beer in aluminum resealable bottles since they opened Philipsburg Brewing Co. in 2012. Now, at their Montana Silver Springs facility, they’re bottling a more precious commodity: sustainably packaged and locally 60
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sourced water. And they’re distributing in Yellowstone, where plastic bottles of water are consumed in alarming quantities. “We knew everybody wanted to do away with plastic, but we didn’t know if there would be a market for this here,” Cathy said. “When the National Park Service tried to eliminate plastic water bottles in the parks, we knew we were on to something.” In 2011, NPS established a policy encouraging national parks to end the sale of single-use plastic water bottles. Of 417 national park sites, 23 participated, preventing up to 2 million plastic bottles from being used and discarded every year, and avoiding up to 141 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. The Trump administration rescinded the “ban” in August of 2017, but many parks continue to seek out sustainable product alternatives. Yellowstone National Park Lodges, part of Xanterra Travel Collection and the main concessionaire in Yellowstone, is shifting to reusable and recyclable aluminum bottles. In doing so, it says it will eliminate approximately 250,000 plastic bottles from the park each year. Cathy and Nolan are bottling and distributing the spring water in the same recyclable aluminum bottles they use for beer. So far, they have contracts with Xanterra, Montanabased promoter Logjam Presents, and the Co-op in Bozeman, with plenty more prospective clients on the horizon. In 2016, Yellowstone National Park Lodges signed a contract with NPS, which included a commitment to stop