An Idiot’s Guide To The Circular Economy Explained Through Beer
Last week I was invited to a climate conference for those working in media on how we can better advocate for climate change courtesy of Groundswell Giving at Young Henrys Brewery.
Groundswell Giving is a climate change community helping to pool funds and apply for grants for organisations tackling climate change in Australia. Since launching in 2020, the Groundswell community has raised and distributed over $2.8 million to grassroots climate advocacy right across the country, collectively building momentum for ambitious climate action. There were many decorated professionals at this conference who win journalism awards and probably sit in on UN meetings in their spare time so I felt a little bit out of place at the start as someone who isn’t a climate-specific reporter. But as the conversation and panel got going, I realised that these journalists struggle with the same thing that I do and that is reporting on the relentless, critical issue that is climate change in a way that isn’t always doom and gloom. Even more so when our population is faced with crisis’ all around us, which crisis do we pay attention too?
After the panel discussion, we were shown around the Young Henry’s brewery where two fluro green tanks of algae carbon capture systems sit as a part of the Algae Project they are working on in conjunction with the University of Technology Sydney’s Climate Change Cluster (C3) to make brewing beers a carbon-neutral process. These innovations are created as part of the company’s drive to adapt to the principles of a circular economy and it reminded me of the first article I had published at Monster Children called An Idiot’s Guide To The Circular Economy. Just as Young Henrys have taken an out-of-the-box approach to tackling sustainable beer, adding a plant grown under the sea to the process, I wanted to take a leaf out of their book and explain an important sustainability concept through our favourite currency - beer.
There’s a number of related principles that underpin a circular economy, but at its core, it’s about closing a linear process into a large circle, reducing the byproducts along the way. When it comes to making beers - crop cultivation, transport and fermentation are where majority of the industry’s emissions are made. At Young Henry’s Brewery in Newtown, two algae vats are hooked up to the exhaust of the fermentation tank. While the process is quite complex the algae basically captures the CO2 and naturally processes it into lean and usable liquid CO2. Most importantly as Jesse Searls from Young Henrys explains ‘one bioreactor in the brewery produces the same amount of oxygen as a hectare of Australian bush,’ helping to neutralise the emissions produced.
Moving further along the process, those adopting circular principles understand that at the end of a product’s life, there is no making it go away; it’s either going into the ground or the ocean, so they work to turn it into something else. As the green algae in the Young Henrys vats grows deeper in colour as it consumes more carbon, it is added to the spent grain produced by the brewery which is sent to farms as feed for livestock. This ties in another unbelievable concept of the circular economy which is sharing. Sorry, what? Working together is going to help the earth? Converting by-products from one industry into valuable product(s) for another is really where it all ties in. The most incredible part of this concept is how the algae fed to the livestock, known as algae dosing, reduces the methane released by the livestock. In other words - they fart less! I don’t know about you but that is both the funniest and most brilliant thing ever.
I don’t really know which point of the circle we are up to now but it’s worth mentioning that algae can be added as fertiliser for the grain used in the beer. I think the most important lesson from all of this though is that whether you are brewing beers, writing articles or trying to do your bit at home it takes creative ways to tackle climate crisis.