Innovation

From Day 1 of New Belgium Brewery, sustainability and environmental awareness was foremost in the minds of founders Jeff Lebesch and Kim Jordan's mind. The first brewing attempt resulted in Jeff placing a tin lid over the brew kettle to capture the steam and utilize the heat from it to heat the incoming water for the next batch. This spirit of sustainable innovation carried over to New Belgium Brewery voting on and self-implementing an "energy tax" that set an internal standard for minimizing external energy purchased from Fort Collins (this energy tax was made official in the company’s charter in 2013). For every kilowatt or energy unit purchased from an external source, New Belgium Brewery committed themselves to self-imposing a fine that is meant to be reinvested in sustainable technology initiatives to ultimately lower the usage and purchase of external energy.

Coming full circle, the energy tax is a positive practice of diminishing returns; using less external energy means a lower energy tax incurred but also correlates to a smaller carbon footprint. Employees also willingly turned down a year-end bonus that would then be contributed to an energy tax fund. An employee-elected committee meets to evaluate potential ideas on what to spend the energy tax fund on with the very first investment being a wind and solar energy technology purchase. This Resource Management Team decides on 3-5 projects per year on what to spend the fund on with an internal portal where all employees can submit ideas to be considered. The fund is replenished via internal taxation on the amount of purchased electricity.

Starting in 2002, the Fort Collins Process Water Treatment Plant began to utilize anaerobic microbe in treating their waste water that is washed out and contaminated following the brewing process and considered ‘waste water.’ The microbe treatment processes the waste particles in the water and releases a methane-rich gas as a byproduct to ‘cleaning’ the water. This methane by-product is then pumped back into the brewery and utilized as a natural gas fuel for the CHP and co-gen engines that preheat water for the pre-brewing process. The treated water is sent back to the city water treatment plant with 50% used in the city’s system and discharged into the river. An additional newer AVL Process Water is under construction that is expected to generate greater methane levels for and correlated with a decrease in external energy consumption. A portion of the water is reused at the bottling line.

Industry wise, New Belgium Brewery is setting the standard with co-chairing the Brewers’ Association and openly invites both top competitors and small start-up breweries to tour their facilities and ‘consult’ on their sustainability success stories. They have been at the forefront of spreading best practice advice to the beverage industry in general and openly involve themselves at conferences that collaborate and share information, all outside the bounds of the beverage industry market competition.

Inspiration

New Belgium Brewery would be considered radically sustainable and environmentally sensitive in every other industry; however, they go above and beyond as they are pioneering the way beer is brewed from its main headquarters in Fort Collins, Colorado. Following from co-founder Jeff Lebesch’s Belgian roots, Jeff (an electrical engineer by trade but brewer by vocation) has literally embedded environmental consciousness and general sustainability in the ethos of New Belgium Brewery, in addition to being 100% employee owned. Co-founder Jeff Lebesch's passion for brewing may owe partly to his Belgian roots but his professional training as an electrical engineer and technical knowledge has provided him a platform to positively impact his company in several different ways; his ambition to make New Belgium Brewery totally self-sustainable and to minimize to the utmost their carbon footprint and energy usage is improved with his engineering background. Not only does Jeff contribute to the technical aspect of sustainability by recommending and striving for more efficiency but it carries over to his employees in a very tangible way.

Overall impact

The self-imposed internal energy tax at New Belgium Brewery is a check on the company for any and all outside energy it purchases by saving the tax and then reinvesting it in sustainable technologies that further remove its need for outside energy purchase. The larger the energy tax is, the larger the monetary investment is that is used to purchase and implement better and more efficient technology that results in a lower need for New Belgium Brewery to purchase external energy (and thus leading to a lower energy tax further down the line).

The biogas process not only cleans the waste water and allows for the water to be reused again in the bottling plant but also generates methane gas in the process that is used to power the co-gen engines and other heavy machinery involved. The biogas scrubbing and reuse process is a tangible example of the energy tax being used to purchase and implement additional technology that then reduces New Belgium Brewery's environmental impact and additionally benefits New Belgium Brewery in a fiscally responsible way and lends them industry renown for being both efficient and sustainable. This would not be possible if New Belgium Brewery's product was affected; on the contrary, New Belgium Brewery has been growing as a result of embracing and marrying sustainable practices with internal methods of positive energy use enforcement.

Business benefit

The internal energy tax reduces overall "dirty" energy consumption that is used by New Belgium Brewery but also reduces its environmental footprint and reliance on non-renewable forms of energy and directs that effort to sustainable means of energy usage (mainly biogas and further use of internal energy tax funds to purchase more efficient machinery or sustainable technologies). The internal energy tax should be adopted by all relevant business models as a way of holding themselves accountable to being sustainable and not just via the initial investment in property/plant/equipment capital that is then not maximized. Additional add-on technologies only serve to heighten and expand divorce from conventional dirty energy consumption and allow for saving in the long-term via less and less purchases of outside energy.

Social and environmental benefit

New Belgium Brewery decreased their energy purchased from the city of Fort Collins, implemented healthy enforcement of sustainability and meeting sustainability goals via the energy tax, and incorporated the formation of a closed-loop cycle of energy usage and renewal and innovative implementation. This last one is the cycle of solar power used to drive the energy generators at New Belgium Brewery, water is then used in the formation and distillation of beer and other products, which contaminates the water but is then cleaned and scrubbed via bacterial injection. Once the bacteria digest and process the waste in the used water, they produce methane gas a by-product that is captured and used to fuel the co-gen engines.

Interview

Katie Wallace, Assistant Director of Sustainability