With the holiday season in swing and with tons of people going out drinking at all the hotels, bars, restaurants, and night clubs I have noticed lots of empty beer kegs all over the place.  Many restaurants and bars keep their empty kegs out back between their dumpster and their grease trap.  The kegs are empty, right?  So why not keep them next to the worthless garbage?  

They fail to realize that these kegs have a $10 deposit on each of them and that they can be returned to just about any large beverage distributer for $10 each regardless of whether or not they were originally purchased from them.  So would you leave a stack of $10 bills behind your restaurant near the garbage?  That’s essentially what they are doing.

So it would be really easy for someone to take these kegs since they are leaving them out near the garbage (sometimes even in shared or public areas) and return them at the local beverage center for $10 each.

Another crazy thing is that beer kegs only have a $10 deposit, but they cost about $150 to make and they can be sold at scrap yards for as much as $15-$35.  So it may be possible to actually purchase the empty kegs for $10 each and then sell them as scrap metal for even more money.  According to the beer institute this type of practice costs the industry as much as $50 million a year.

They have even considered raising the deposit amount from $10 to $30 to prevent people from selling their empty beer kegs rather than returning them.  See the following article: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3244421 for details on this.  So it may even make even sense to hold onto these empty beer kegs that are now worth $10 each (deposit value) until this increase takes place and raises the deposit value on kegs to $30. 

I was amazed at the fact that so many bars, restaurants, hotels, and night clubs leave their empty kegs (worth $10 each) near the garbage, but I was totally baffled at the fact that the entire beer keg industry would only require a $10 deposit for something worth as much as $150 and that could be sold elsewhere for as much as $35.  This could totally set someone up to start a business where they purchase kegs for $10 each and sell them for $35 each for a whopping 250% return on each or even as little as $25 each for a 150% return which is still not bad. 

As it stands right now, there is lots of money to be made from the faulty practices and standards with the keg return industry.