Brewdog has gone carbon negative, double offsetting scope 1, 2 and upstream scope 3 carbon emissions.
The firm has bought 2050 acres in the Scottish Highlands, and by 2022 will plant 1,500 acres of forest, more than a million trees, and create 550 acres of peatlands.
Brewdog is working with Prof. Mike Berners-Lee of Small World Consulting on its carbon programme, dubbed Make Earth Great Again, committing to drastically cut its footprint over the next two years and to become zero waste.
The firm’s UK brewery and broader operations are already powered by renewable energy. It also produces biomethane from malted barley by-product and said an anaerobic digester that turns its wastewater into pure water and biomethane would be operational by 2021.
Publishing its commitment as a sustainability report, the firm sets out and breaks down its current carbon footprint across international operations.
Its interim carbon removal partners (offset scheme operators) are Gold Standards, CCB Standards, Verified Carbon Standard and Woodland Carbon CO2de.
In a foreword to the sustainability report, Mike Berners-Lee, Brewdog’s lead scientific advisor, said it was “no good waiting for politicians to lead the way” on decarbonisation, and that “so far, almost the entire business world has dragged its feet with a mixture of denial, greenwash, apathy and fear.
“With the actions laid out in this report, Brewdog is giving some of the leadership that the world so badly needs.”
Brewdog’s founders James Watt and Martin Dickie said they want to make the firm “a catalyst for change”.
They wrote: “The scientific consensus is clear: we are sleepwalking off the edge of a cliff. Unless the world confronts the urgent carbon problem, science tells us that the results will be catastrophic.
“There has been too much bullshit and lack of meaningful action for too long. Huge change is needed right now.”
See the plan here.
CO2 from gas scrubbing put into a can to make the drink fizzy … is this CO2-negative?!