This article is from LiveScience. Hopefully this idea starts to spread - it’s great to know making beer can be so light on the environment if done right. Cheers!
By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience
posted: 21 August 2009 08:54 am ET
After beer is made, the waste from breweries could help generate power, researchers now suggest.
One problem brewers face is what to do with the thousands of tons of grain left over at the end of the brewing process. In the past, they just sold the waste to farmers who either fed it to their animals or spread it on their fields as fertilizer. However, in Europe, given reductions in cattle breeding and stricter regulations on what waste is allowed on land, neither option is as easy anymore.
“We reached a situation in 2000 where breweries even had to pay to dispose of their spent grain,” said researcher Wolfgang Bengel, the technical director of BMP Biomasse Projekt, a German biomass company.
Instead of a headache, Bengel saw a business opportunity. He had previously taken waste from rice and sugar cane and produced energy from it in China and Thailand, and thought a similar process could be developed for brewery leftovers. Such energy could help fuel the breweries themselves.
“Beermaking is energy intensive — you boil stuff, use hot water and steam and then use electric energy for cooling — so if you recover more than 50 percent of your own energy costs from the spent grain, that’s a big saving,” Bengel explained.
