One of Poland’s largest beer producers, Żywiec, is collecting unsold beer from restaurants and bars to produce biogas to power its breweries.
Before the pandemic, Poles drank 4.5 billion zloty (€1 billion) worth of beer in restaurants and bars annually. However, with the hospitality sector closed for much of the last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, consumption has fallen by over 40%, reports Rzeczpospolita.
Polish Breweries, an industry group, estimates that 12 million zloty (€2.7 million) worth of beer in restaurants and pubs – which is often purchased in large kegs – has gone bad during lockdown, reports Euractiv.
Now Żywiec has collected 35,000 kegs of unused beer with the aim of converting it into biogas, said the company in a statement reported by Gazeta Wyborcza.
Switching to the environmentally friendly fuel, which can be made through the anaerobic breakdown of organic matter found in wastewater and beer, is part of the company’s long-term push towards “closed-loop” and “zero-waste” practices.
The brewer, which was founded in 1856, runs the first industrial plant in Poland to use wastewater treatment technology to transform organic material into biogas, according to Magazyn Biomasa, a trade publication.
Water used to wash tanks and bottles during the beer production process provides a breeding ground for microorganisms, which enable biogas to be generated. Żywiec uses biogas to make thermal energy for the beer production process, including for brewing and pasteurisation.
W naszych browarach w Żywcu, Namysłowie i Warce wykorzystujemy odnawialne źródła energii! Jak? Podstawowym elementem produkcji są… ścieki! Pozyskany w procesie fermentacji biogaz wykorzystujemy w naszej kotłowni. Więcej informacji: https://t.co/f5COWXEZVS
— Grupa Żywiec (@GrupaZywiec) July 6, 2020
Biogas is also used to heat the company’s buildings in winter. Up to 13% of the thermal energy generated in the boiler room of the company’s Archduke Brewery in the town of Żywiec comes from the combustion of biogas, according to its director, Paweł Bernatek.
More widely, Żywiec, which has been majority owned by Heineken since 1994, has been implementing its “Warzymy Lepszy Świat” (“We Brew a Better World”) sustainability for a decade, with the aim of reducing emissions, promote sustainable agriculture and conserving water resources.
Since 2008, the brewery has reduced carbon dioxide emissions from beer production by nearly 60% and decreased water consumption by 12%. Almost all of the electricity used by the company now comes from renewable sources. Wastewater is also reused in pasteurisers.
The company has also launched a campaign to encourage customers to return beer bottles. The campaign allows buyers to return them to stores – with almost 7,000 shops across Poland participating in the scheme – and receive 0.35 groszy (€0.08) per bottle in return.
Main image credit: Mr.TinDC/Flickr (under CC BY-ND 2.0)
Juliette Bretan is a freelance journalist covering Polish and Eastern European current affairs and culture. Her work has featured on the BBC World Service, and in CityMetric, The Independent, Ozy, New Eastern Europe and Culture.pl.
