Coors Light is the second biggest selling beer brand^ in the United States. The fact that Coors Light, MillerCoors, and global parent Molson Coors have made substantive commitments to environmental sustainability and carbon emissions reductions is significant if not surprising — competitors like AB-InBev and Carlsberg are on a similar path.

What is news is that Coors Light is telling its sustainability stories to consumers through its “Climb On” campaign and its “EveryOneCan” initiative. GreenSportsBlog talked to Lane Goggin, Associate Marketing Manager at Coors Light, to learn more.

Sports sponsors have, for the most part, chosen not to tell their greening stories to fans. Sure, some über-green brands like Ben & Jerry’s, Vestas (wind power) and BASF have used sports to promote their sustainability bona fides and/or urge positive environmental action by fans. But the mainstream sports advertisers (car companies, athletic apparel, beer, etc.) have largely been silent.

Until now, that is.

Coors Light, the second biggest selling beer brand in the US, is, according to Associate Marketing Manager Lane Goggin, “capturing super-engaged sports fans, while they’re at games, watching on TV or scrolling through Instagram.”

Coors Light Artfully Brings Its Green Messaging to Six Major League Baseball Ballparks

Baseball fans were engaged this season when the brand diverted thousands of cans left or collected in the stadium in a very, well, diverting way — they were turned into sculptures at six Major League Baseball stadiums where the brand has existing partnerships: AT&T Park (San Francisco Giants), Angels Stadium (Los Angeles Angels), Chase Field (Arizona Diamondbacks), Coors Field (Colorado Rockies) (no surprise there!), Safeco Field (Seattle Mariners), and SunTrust Park (Atlanta Braves).

Once stadiums take down the artworks, all cans will go back into the production cycle, although most of the teams plan to keep the sculptures in place. Says Goggin, “We’ve gotten a great response from the teams, fans and the artists. They love it!”
Environmental Messaging Will Find Receptive Audience in Millennials 
And, while not sports-specific, these environmentally-themed initiatives are reaching sports fans via Coors Light media buys and other sports-focused marketing efforts:

• EveryoneCan is a nationwide program built on the principle that everyone, from brewers to bartenders to consumers, can and should strive to practice environmental stewardship. The program includes a partnership with TerraCycle, the Trenton, NJ-based green business All-Star that upcycles recycled stuff into different stuff. Working with TerraCycle and other partners, Coors Light will reduce environmental impact in a variety of ways, including rewarding consumers with cooler bags made from recycled vinyl advertisements and grills made from recycled kegs.
• Select Coors Light TV and digital ads contain the tagline “sustainably brewing the World’s Most Refreshing Beer.”
• The Coors Light XP (experience) consumer rewards app includes grills made from recycled kegs.

Why is Coors Light featuring the environment in its messaging to sports fans (and to the broader public) while most other mainstream brands are not doing so — at least not yet?

Goggin cited several research studies which show that consumers, especially young adults, care about environmental sustainability: “According to one; the 2015 Nielsen Global Sustainability Report, 66 percent of consumers and 75 percent of millennials say they are willing to pay more for sustainable goods and that number is growing.”

And promoting a clean, healthy environment is something that fits Coors Light’s decades-long outdoorsy, rugged, pristine Rocky Mountain heritage like a glove. “At Coors, recycling is nothing new,” shared Goggin. “It started in the 1950s, when Bill Coors determined that there had to be a more sustainable way to package our beer. He went on to pioneer the recyclable aluminum can, and it wasn’t long before others followed his lead. Today, aluminum is still the sustainable standard in the industry.”
MillerCoors a Green LeaderMuch more recently, MillerCoors built the most powerful solar array at any brewery in the United States in 2015 with its 3.2 megawatt facility in Irwindale, CA. The eight major MillerCoors breweries in the US are landfill free — meaning no glass, paperboard, plastics or metal waste are sent to landfills — as of February 2016, as verified by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Any remaining non-reusable or recyclable brewery waste is sent to a waste-to-energy facility, which has now become a standard practice across MillerCoors. Globally, Molson Coors is working towards reaching aggressive carbon footprint reduction targets by 2025: Reduce direct carbon emissions by 50 percent from a 2016 baseline, while achieving a 20 percent reduction from the entire supply/value chain.

In addition to its broad, green-themed consumer marketing campaigns, Coors Light also connected with a much narrower target audience — green-sports practitioners — when it became the official beer sponsor of the 2017 Green Sports Alliance summit in Sacramento.

“Coors Light was the presenting sponsor and provided an indoor and outdoor bar,” related Goggin. “2017 was the right year to do it since we brought our sustainability messaging to sports venues and sports fans in a direct way. The Alliance Summit was a great opportunity for us to talk with and learn from so many green-sports experts. We learned a lot and hope to apply what we learned in the green-sports space going forward.”
Hope Coors Light Adds Climate Change to its Green Messaging
GreenSportsBlog hopes one of the most important things Coors Light learns from its forays into green-sports is that it is OK — and actually a plus — to mention “climate change” in its environmental sustainability-themed ads (and other messaging), including those that target sports fans.

The brand chose not to do so, despite millennials ranking climate change as the world’s most serious issue, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Shaper Survey#. Add to that the clear statement from Molson Coors saying it understands “the need to address the challenges that face our industry, from the impacts of climate change to the growing need to protect our natural resources.”

It says here that, if future green-themed Coors Light communications campaigns “go there” on climate change, millennials will react positively. But that is a discussion for another day. Today, Coors Light deserves major kudos for its big-brand, green-sports leadership.

Here’s one more GreenSportsBlog hope: That other big sports advertisers, especially those targeting the rising generations, follow the Coors Light example by serving up environmentally-themed messaging.
 

^ Bud Light is the biggest selling beer brand in the US

# World Economic Forum’s Global Shaper Survey talked to 31,000 18-35 year olds in 186 countries and territories

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