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At Russell Reid, we are always interested to hear stories about recycling and beneficial reuse of wastewater.   Breweries throughout the world are becoming experts at reusing and conserving resources, and the techniques they have developed are now being adopted by other industries.   Here are two examples:

Anheuser-Busch, producer of Budweiser among many other beers, uses “Bio-Energy Recovery Systems” (BERS) to pre-treat wastewater and capture biogas.  Say what?  They use BERS to make beer.  Here’s what it means.

BERS is a way of treating and cleansing wastewater and capturing biogas (methane) from waste products.  The treated water is then recycled for use in the manufacturing process as they do in Australia.  Biogas that is recovered is used to heat their boiler systems resulting in a reduction of energy cost and usage. 

Water is becoming a scarce and precious commodity in many areas of the world and Australia has been suffering its worst drought in recorded history over the past ten years.  The country is taking extreme measures to conserve and reuse water in any way possible, and this has had a major impact on the countries’ breweries.   Queensland, the northernmost province, is forcing all companies to reduce water consumption by at least 25% this year.  Well, Foster’s and Lion Nathan, Australia’s two largest brewers, are doing better than that.  In fact Lion Nathan is reducing the amount of water needed to produce one pint of beer down to 2.2 pints of water.  This is quite remarkable when just ten years ago, it took ten pints of water to produce one pint of beer.  How is this possible when most breweries still need at least five pints of water to make one pint of beer?  Here’s how.

Foster’s and Lion Nathan have implemented creative recycling and purification measures to minimize water loss.  This includes using recylced water that they purify on their premises for such things as:

• Cleaning packaging lines
• Lubricating conveyors
• Cleansing the outside of kegs
• Capturing rainwater for toilet facilities
• Operating vacuum pumps, cooling towers, and boilers

Of course, no recycled water ever touches the beer itself, so the product is as safe and tasty as it ever was.  The only difference is that the beer is now becoming as environmentally friendly as the greenest products on the planet. 

So, the next time you want to toss down a cold one, be confident that you are consuming one of the greenest products around.