It’s a little too easy to create a ton of waste while you’re getting wasted. Unless you’re near a store that provides growlers or you invest in a keg, drinking a lot of beer creates a lot of empty beer cans. And if you happen to be drinking at one of those bars that hands out paper coasters a little too liberally, you’re piling up even more useless waste.
The beer company Molson Canadian’s on a green kick, though, and they’ve created coasters that aren’t entirely useless. Each coaster has seeds wedged in it, and if you plant it and water it, it’ll grow into a big tall Black Spruce tree.
Of course, to get the coasters, you have to buy specially marked packs of Molson Canadian’s beer, and you probably weren’t picking up a pack of coasters with every six-pack to begin with. On the other hand, paper coasters inevitably turn wet and soggy by the end of a beer or two, so drinkers have a head start on seed germination. In my experience, these seed-and-paper plant starters never work as well as you hope, but in the best of all possible worlds, the result of this advertising campaign will be a forest of Black Spruce trees, planted in a drunken haze, growing crookedly across Canada, and a generation of Canadians pointing proudly to their very own spruce and telling their kids, “That’s our drunk tree.”
