Sustainability for the Long Haul

Helping Kettle and other companies are the incentives to encourage sustainable manufacturing that are offered by local and state governments. “Oregon has tremendous tax breaks to encourage people to convert to solar panels and other devices,” Green said. “The first thing any business should look at is energy demand.”

Recovering and reusing CO₂ can save millions of dollars and reduce trucking emissions.

From Beer to Animal Feed

Sierra Nevada has benefited greatly from such incentives. Chastain said that when the company installed hydrogen fuel cells for energy five years ago, 70% of the installation cost was covered by rebates and incentives from the local utility and the federal government. The company also taps power from solar cells it installed. In 2009, Sierra self-generated 84% of its power. Sierra Nevada’s drive to sustainability, like Kettle’s, started with the company’s founding 30 years ago. “There hasn’t been an ‘aha’ moment over the past 10 years,” Chastain said.

But there has been some creative thinking and basic assessment of what comes into and goes out of the plant. “Barley and hops are a fixed input,” she said. “We work with farmers to have more sustainable farming practices. And energy and water can be reduced a lot. Heat can be recovered and water reused.” The company found that spent grain and yeast have value as additives in the cattle and dairy industries.

Sierra pulls out the sugars, but there’s a lot of protein left for the feed. Tanker trucks pick up the spent grain and yeast. Sierra gets paid for the grain. The liquid yeast, with the hauling, is a wash in terms of price. In 2009, the company had 32,000 tons of solid waste left, like spent grain and glass, but it recycled so much that only 160 tons went to a landfill. “So we had a 99.5% diversion rate in 2009,” she said, noting that this year the company is on track to hit 99.7%.

The company has identified key performance indicators that it tracks, such as energy and water per barrel of beer produced. It keeps a greenhouse gas inventory that is reported to the climate registry, an effort that started with the voluntary California Climate Action Registry that has now gone national.

“Over the last five years we have decreased energy consumption by 20% everywhere and generated about 75% of our electricity on site,” said Chastain. Part of the energy generation is from repurposed CO₂, which brewers use a lot of, both to carbonate beer and to sanitize.

“We don’t bring in CO₂,” Chastain said. “Our fermentation tanks generate CO₂, and instead of venting it to the atmosphere, we recover it and recycle it. It saves millions of dollars a year by not having to buy CO₂ and it decreases trucking emissions.” A pressurized system pulls CO₂ off the top of the fermentation tanks. Then it is cleaned, compressed, and stored in liquid form until it is regassified for reuse.

Valigra is a science journalist based in Cambridge, Mass. Reach her at [email protected].