Effect of brewery size on the main process parameters and cradle-to-grave carbon footprint of lager beer

Abstract

Several carbon footprint (CF) studies have been so far carried out to assess the environmental impact of the brewing industry. In this work, a series of reliable secondary data for small-, medium-, and large-sized breweries were collected and used to develop a simplified model to estimate the cradle-to-grave (C2G) CF of the production of a functional unit consisting of 1 hL of lager beer packed in 66-cL (glass or polyethylene terephthalate, PET) bottles. With reference to the typical operating conditions of nine breweries of different size, the C2G CF was found to increase up to 43-45% either for glass or PET bottles as the brewery size reduced from 10x106 to 500 hL/yr. Whatever the brewery size, the use of PET instead of glass bottles lowered the beer CF by 2.7+/+0.9%. The contribution of the consumer and post-consumer waste disposal phases was found to be significant. Thus, beer makers should pay attention to the recycling ratio of post-consumer packaging in the sales areas. The cradle-to-grave CF tended to increase linearly with the overall (thermal and electric) energy needed to produce 1 hL of beer, almost independently of the primary packaging material used. Such a simple and easy-to-measure quantitative indicator might be more than sufficient not only to estimate qualitatively the environmental burden of beer production, but also to identify which mitigation opportunities might be explored or to prioritize primary data collection efforts to refine CF calculation.