You’re standing in front of the cooler, trying to choose the perfect beer for a spring evening. But beyond the dilemma of lager versus ale lies a more serious question: bottle or can? LIME lays out the arguments on both sides.

Cans

Aluminum cans are lighter than glass bottles, so they require less fuel to truck them from the factory to your local retailer. But that’s not the whole story. Creating metal aluminum is a resource-intensive process: four to six metric tons of the mineral bauxite are required to produce one metric ton of metal aluminum. Bauxite is strip-mined in tropical and sub-tropical regions, such as Jamaica, Brazil, and Indonesia, where mining is not subject to the same level of environmental regulation as it is in more developed countries. Bauxite is crushed and put through a series of chemical processes to produce alumina powder, which is then smelted into metal. Smelters are generally located in places where energy is cheap: Alcoa, for example, is constructing a smelter in Iceland that will be powered by a massive hydroelectric project fed by a glacial river. (That project is destroying a vast wilderness area and has angered many Icelanders and Europeans.)