Lesson 3 - Environmental Sustainability SAQ

** You have been asked to design a water strategy for your brewery. After some initial research, you have found that your brewery is located in an area with increasing water scarcity. How could your brewery respond to this through its water strategy?

Response:

Breweries are often amongst the largest single water users in a watershed. Understanding the watershed beyond the brewery walls is an important way to understand the impact of the water we are using and if there are risks to the long-term availability of water.

One litre of water consumed in a watershed that is under high water stress has a greater impact on the environment than a litre consumed where water is abundant. Therefore, water availability can represent a physical risk to the financial future of brewing operations.

As the question specifies, the brewery is operating in a watershed that has increasing water scarcity. This increasing shortage is likely being driven by the rising local population and agriculture demands, combined with the effects of climate change altering rainfall patterns in the region.

To respond to this issue, we should ensure our water strategy covers the following:

• Developing a policy that commits the brewery to ensure that both itself and the local community have secure access to safe water now and in the future.

• Inside the brewery we should:

  • Understand the brewery water supply:

    • If water is sourced directly from the environment such as groundwater wells, we need to understand how the aquifer works in more detail and how it is being affected by the increasing pressures on water locally. This will give us a better baseline understanding of the physical water risks the brewery is facing.

    • If water is sourced from a municipal water supply, work with the water company to understand how the brewery can support in the management of any issues.

  • Reduce total water use:

    • Long-term goals should be set to increase water efficiency and reduce total water use. We can base what is possible on:

      • Benchmarking water efficiency with other breweries.

      • What is needed to be sustainable in water use from the information we have generated from investigating the health of the aquafer we source from.

    • We can achieve the goals to reduce water use by:

      • Educating people at all levels on sustainable water use and its importance to the brewery.

      • Engaging people through highlighting water usage in specific initiatives such as leak hunts and ongoing efforts to ensure good water housekeeping becomes part of everyday activity.

      • Investigating and implementing water efficiency projects. This would include investigating water reuse and recycling, initially for non-product use, but we would investigate product use in the future if this was needed.

• • Improve wastewater treatment

• • • If a brewery-owned wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) is utilised, it must be ensured that it is being well run and only very clean water is released back into the environment.

    • If wastewater is currently sent to the local municipal WWTP for treatment, the municipal plant should be contacted to understand the long-term viability of this arrangement.

      • If the current arrangement is not going to be viable (for example the municipal plant is reaching capacity from the increasing population) the brewery should investigate installing an on-site WWTP to reduce pressure on the municipal plant.

      • This plant should be scoped to treat water to the highest standard, so that clean water is released back into the environment.

• • • Additionally, in both scenarios, a WWTP could be installed that utilises an anaerobic digestion phase with biogas energy collection, which can be used as an energy source for the brewery.

• Outside the brewery we should:

  • Continue to engage with local stakeholders on water use and stewardship.

  • Aim to encourage other watershed users to take action through a watershed users forum, with the aim of sharing information, best practice and driving collective action.

  • Investigate the supply chain to understand where suppliers are located in areas of water stress and engage with key suppliers where this is needed.

The Alliance for Watershed Stewardship’s standard on water stewardship may be helpful as a guide to best practice responses in these efforts, especially across the wider watershed. Although certification to this standard would not be an aim in itself, it may be useful at a later stage in the programme, particularly in having the confidence to communicate our water management and stewardship efforts externally.

We should also plan to continually evaluate this programme’s effectiveness and find new and creative ways to improve both our brewery's water security and sustainability and that of our wider watershed community. We should also bear in mind that if we were to expand our operations, we should look for sites that are in water abundant areas and factor water sustainability into sourcing any new brewery sites.