Greening Your Beer with Brewery’s CO2 Eating Algae, Blockchain Tracing, Converting Brewery Waste into Detergents and More

July 06, 2020

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by Helena Tavares Kennedy (Biofuels Digest) ... In today’s Digest, how a brewery in Australia is utilizing algae that eats up CO2 and spits out oxygen, all the cool things you can make with beer and liquor production waste (going beyond ethanol and biofuel), how blockchain is helping track beer from field to glass in Canada, and more.

Why is this important? Young Henrys brewery points out that the CO2 from the fermentation of just one six pack of beer takes a tree two full days to absorb. Not to mention converting a polluting, climate change causing waste product like CO2 into something valuable is worth doing.

CO2 eating algae at a brewery near you!

News came in from Australia that the Young Henrys brewery is working with scientists at University of Technology Sydney Climate Change Cluster (C3) to utilize algae that consumes CO2 (a byproduct of the brewing process) and releasing oxygen, which could make brewing a more carbon neutral process. In fact, this brewery could become carbon neutral thanks to the CO2-chomping algae.

You can register to get a virtual tour of the brewery and their algae bioreactors, followed by an expert panel about the potential of algae and how they use it in everyday life at their website here.

How it works

Dr. Alexandra Thomson, a driving force behind their algae project chatted to MiNDFOOD recently, check out the interview here. Essentially, the brewery has calculated how much CO2 they are emitting as a by-product of yeast converting sugars into alcohol “and the algae, due to their fast-growing nature, sucks an equivalent amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere during photosynthesis.”

The green-glowing bioreactors are on the brew floor among the brewery equipment, with each millilitre containing roughly 5 million microalgae cells – or individual organisms.

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So other than drinking it, what else is beer or liquor good for?

Detergents: There are other cases of using waste alcohol for good, like Ecover who teamed up with InBev to create detergents from the alcohol removed from InBev’s beers, as reported in The Digest in October 2019. Both the water and ethanol in Ecover’s “Too Good to Waste” detergent line come from InBev’s beer making process, making up at least a quarter of the overall content. Ecover sees waste as a major opportunity for its business and products moving forward and is currently looking at what it can do with waste CO2 as well.
Charcoal Briquettes: Another useful item that many used this 4^th of July weekend is charcoal briquettes for a good ole’ American BBQ, and even better, a UK researcher is now making some out of brewery waste, as reported in The Digest in November 2019. Breweries in the EU throw out around 3.4 million tons of unspent grain every year, weighing the equivalent of 500,000 elephants. Using just 1kg of the grain, a researcher from the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering has been able to create enough activated carbon to spread across 100 football pitches. That’s pretty impressive! The researcher is hoping to explore opportunities for the commercialization of the method in creating activated carbon and carbon nanotubes.
Ethanol and Vinegar: In Belgium, AB InBev teamed with Alcogroup to produce ethanol from the residual alcohol produced in the manufacturing process for alcohol-free beer, as reported in The Digest in February 2019. Three tanker trucks per week transport about 75,000 liters of residual alcohol for processing, or roughly one liter for every 85 cans of alcohol-free beer. That comes to about 8,500 cans of beer result in enough residual alcohol to produce 18 liters of ethanol. In Australia, the company uses the residual alcohol for making vinegar.
Biofuel: Looking as far back as July 2017 when Celtic Renewables made the world’s first test drive running on Scotch whisky – well, ok, technically biobutanol made from whisky residue – we can see innovation in using liquor waste materials. In December 2018, Celtic Renewables signed an MOU with Dross Energy to produce biobutanol from brewery and distillery waste in an effort to clean up the Ganges River.
Vice-versa, beer from cacao beans: In an opposite move in Colombia, taking waste and turning it into beer, scientists at the Industrial University of Santander are creating new products like beer from cacao beans waste material. As reported in The Digest in June 2019, the Nextcoa project’s purpose is to create new cocoa flavors (characteristic of the region) and produce biomaterials for the specialized industry and advanced materials for the food and liquor industries. READ MORE