Brewing a better world
WHO would have known that the green colour on a Heineken bottle, can and logo is more than just a shade. Although the green does not bear any official connotation, per se, it ideally depicts the “green strategies” Heineken upholds and practises.
In 2007, Heineken, one of the largest beer brewers in the world, decided to take up a global strategy to make environmental sustainability a business imperative. It was understanding that business and environmental sustainability were cardinal in establishing a successful commercial entity, that the global company introduced “Brewing a Better World (BaBW)”.
BaBW is basically an action plan or strategy the company established to mitigate the impact of the it’s business operations on the natural environment. Among its primary focus areas are:
Protecting water resources; Reducing carbon emissions; and Sourcing sustainably.
The focus on long-term sustainability heralds a new era for Heineken where profit and environmental targets go hand in hand. To date, ahead of its 2020 aim to become the Greenest Brewer in the World, Heineken already reports significant reductions in water usage and carbon emissions. Ensuing, Heineken Malaysia Berhad shares about its efforts in reducing its carbon and water footprint. every hour). “The first thing we did – and this is common to how we approach all problems – we restored the equipment or machine to its basic condition or how it was supposed to operate when we bought them.” By doing that, Heineken managed to reduce water usage from 22 m3/hour to 9m3/hour. “But we weren’t content with that. So we looked at how the manufacturers had decided that we should be using the machine and we questioned why they had a 2mm nozzle (which goes up into a bottle to wash out the residue).”
As the size of the nozzle basically determines the amount of water that comes out from the nozzle,“we changed that to a 1.5mm (smaller) nozzle, which reduced the amount of water and altered the pressure to ensure that we get the same cleaning effect, ” Mathers informed. The change in nozzle size further reduced the company’s water use significantly, to 4.5 m3/ hour in 2016.
To ensure it kept to its new lower water usage levels, trigger points were set up all through its operations to keep track. Every step of the brewing process operations is also monitored to prevent wastage, from its forecasting (to better control the use of resources like water and energy), to production planning (better planning to reduce frequency of a specific action like cleaning, which saves water) even packaging (recollecting and reusing water, which is used for pasteurisation). reduce its CO2 emissions include: 1.Eliminating compressed air leaks; 2. Optimising creation and usage of
thermal energy; 3. Recovering and reusing energy;
and 4. Increasing efficiency in
distribution.