TOWARD A Sustainable FUTURE
Rum can make moves to become truly sustainable
Rum is mostly made from a byproduct of sugar production, so it’s inherently sustainable, right? Sadly, it’s not that simple. Sustainability is most often used by marketing folks to proclaim their products’ “greenness”, but in reality, the environment is only a third of it.
Often described as a three-legged stool, sustainability is a concept where the planet is considered along with the people who make the products, while ensuring the commercial success of the company selling them. Planet, people, profit: take one leg away and the stool falls down.
The three-legged stool is an easy analogy, but the theory doesn’t always hold in a world where legacy systems allow the abuse of people and planet in the name of profit. When spirits marketeers tout their products’ sustainability credentials, they tend only to focus on environmental issues, and some believe that where rum is concerned, the term “sustainability” has about as much meaning as “solera”. So, what then does sustainable rum production actually require? As with any agricultural product, it all starts in the fields.
Much of the rum industry’s ecological impact begins before the first drop is distilled. Sugarcane is a grass that grows quickly in tropical climes, but is helped along with things like chemical fertiliser, pesticides, and irrigation. Many of the fields in which sugarcane grows were once covered by native flora, so there’s that to consider as well.
In order to mitigate the negative environmental effects of sugarcane production, growers can implement green farming practices including crop rotation, using organic fertilisers, and planting cover crops. By minimising the impact of growing cane, the rum we drink becomes more sustainable by default.
In addition to the environment, sugarcane farming impacts the fieldworkers in profound ways. It’s easy to mentally couple agricole rum with cane cutting, however, about 90 per cent of the world’s rum is made from molasses. That’s why it’s imperative for rum makers to require traceability of their molasses and ensure the people who grow and cut the sugarcane are paid fairly and treated ethically. One organisation facilitating sustainable sugarcane production is BonSucro, a global non-profit based in the UK. Their mission is, “To ensure that responsible sugarcane production creates lasting value for the people, communities, businesses, economies and eco-systems in all cane-growing origins.” By buying molasses from BonSucro-certified cane, rum makers can ensure the people and planet legs of the stool are on firm footing.
With sustainable molasses delivered to the distillery, rum makers still have many opportunities to lessen the impact of making their products, the largest of which is in treating the waste they generate.
Fermented molasses wine is typically about 10% ABV. By distilling the alcohol out of the wine, the distiller is left with about 90 per cent of the starting volume as concentrated waste called vinasse. In a vertically integrated model (as with most producers in the French West Indies) distillers can directly discharge their vinasse to their adjacent cane fields and begin the cycle anew. However, land application of vinasse has negative effects that can harm both the environment and reduce the sugar content in the cane over time. More importantly, the world’s most prodigious rum makers are largely using molasses bought from far away parties, and thus they have no cane fields on which to dispose their waste. The sustainable path here is to turn this liability into an asset.
As far as waste products go, vinasse has a lot of potential, and given the sheer amount of waste generated, it’s garnered a lot of academic research. Scientists have turned vinasse into hydrogen, and even used it to grow fungi that can be used as a low-cost source of protein. The low-hanging fruit with vinasse, however, is to turn it into methane through anaerobic digestion.
Vinasse can be a bit tricky to digest, but through careful design and control, distilleries can at once self-generate the vast majority of the fuel needed to run their stills and render their number one waste stream relatively harmless. Generating energy and valuable co-products from waste represents an incredibly promising path toward profit from sustainability initiatives.
After rum leaves the condenser, there are a host of other factors that affect its sustainability including everything from packaging to air travel of the sales staff, all of which is important. But without sustainable production of sugarcane and proper waste handling of distillery waste, the rest is simply window dressing.
Truly sustainable rum is attainable, and some producers have made great strides. But it may be up to consumers to convince the rest of the world’s rum makers that sustainability is imperative to their survival.