My personal sustainability promise involves something very dear to my heart: beer. I have been thinking lately about the environmental and social impact of the commercial production, transportation and storage of beer. I realize how my consumption of beer helps to perpetuate the system of production and all the unsustainable aspects of the beer production industry. In an effort to reduce my personal carbon footprint I will abstain from drinking commercial beer for FOUR ENTIRE WEEKS.
Homebrew and Garden Cilantro
We, as Oregonians, live in the state with the highest per capita of microbreweries. Heck, you can’t even toss an empty beer can out the window of your Prius without hitting some new microbrewery. (Totally kidding. That can is worth five cents!) Through this blog I will endeavor not to attack my beloved microbreweries, instead I will rather attack the major brewing conglomerates that control most of the beer production in the world today.
In the U.S. much of the beer we consume comes in a glass bottle. These glass bottles require a lot of production energy from raw materials. The bottles are typically used only once, and then disposed of, or possibly recycled. A case study measuring the environmental impact of the production of glass bottles states that they can be reused multiple times before being recycled. (Mata T. Costa C., 318) Why don’t we reuse glass bottles here in the U.S.? Mainly it is because it’s cheaper to produce new bottles than it is to collect, clean, and reuse old ones.
Basic lager beer. An industry term for a type of beer that is produced both here in the U.S. and throughout world. A brewery that produces basic lager beer, or BLB for short, has various inputs and outputs. A brewery uses; water, malted barley, hops, yeast, various other ingredients and energy to produce beer. This BLB has a carbon foot print, that is, it requires resources and energy to be manufactured. The major energy sinks in a brewery are cooling and transportation. (Talve p 298)
I don’t plan on not drinking beer for FOUR ENTIRE WEEKS, but rather finding a suitable alternative. I plan on brewing all the beer that I consume. I hope that this will inspire me to produce my own beer all the time and make me a more independent and worldly individual. Rather than buying commercially brewed 22s at Freddie’s, my money instead will go to The Corvallis Brewing Supply store where I will pick up ingredients for a summer wheat ale. I will reuse beer bottles when it comes time to bottle my summer wheat ale. Hopefully by this time next month I’ll be enjoying a homebrew while sitting in the sun.
Talve Siret, Life Cycle Assessment of a Basic Lager Beer, LCA Case Studies, 2001, 293-298
Teresa M. Mata, Carlos A. V. Costa, Life Cycle Assessment of Different Reuse Percentages of Glass Beer Bottles, LCA Case Studies, 2001, 307-319
Sustainability for the Common Good 