Sustainability's Brewing in Singapore's Beer Market

Published on by in Business

Sustainability's Brewing in Singapore's Beer Market

Asia Pacific Breweries (APB), Singapore’s largest commercial brewery and maker of its iconic Tiger Beer, focuses on six key areas where it can achieve a positive environmental and social impact.

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All Tiger Beer consumed in Singapore is 'brewed by the sun' thanks to a move by Asia Pacific Breweries to install solar panels on its factory roof. The bottles are also part of a closed loop system, where the company recovers and reuses the bottles to reduce packaging waste. Image: Asia Pacific Breweries

These include reducing emissions, protecting water resources, and sourcing sustainably.

Most beer fans are unlikely to think much about the sustainability of their brew before knocking back a pint; just as well perhaps, because the reality of the brewing industry’s environmental impact can be quite sobering.

Water and energy use, the resources that are needed to produce every can, glass bottle, and cardboard carton, and the waste generated when these are carelessly discarded - these are just some of the factors that make up the environmental footprint of a cold one. 

But unlike customers, beer companies and others in the food and beverage sector are finding these issues increasingly impossible to ignore. More firms are realizing that tracking and reducing their environmental impact is not just a matter of corporate responsibility, but of long-term survival.

Based on the sustainability strategy of its parent firm — Dutch giant Heineken, which has been around since 1864 — APB’s Brewing a Better World strategy was launched in 2010. It aims, by 2020, to cut water consumption in its breweries by a quarter; reduce carbon emissions from production by 40 per cent; and source half of its raw materials from sustainable sources.  

Measures the company has taken to achieve these outcomes include implementing a water reclamation project that converts brewery effluent into non-potable water, and using clean energy technologies such as LED lights and solar panels in its buildings. 

Mitchell Leow, APB’s head of corporate affairs, says in a recent interview that while the company is keenly aware of consumer and regulatory environmental issues, “we recognized that sustainability is a key business priority long before there was external pressure to do so”.

4hIYpan.pngThe company, founded in 1931, has in recent years employed strategies to reduce the resource demand of its products, ranging from taking back empty beer kegs and bottles from customers to minuscule reductions in the thickness, width, and weight of the packaging.  

Thanks to these measures, the company last year alone recovered 15,868 tonnes of glass bottles that would otherwise have ended up in the state’s recycling stream, or the landfill. This equates to a 86 per cent recycling rate in Singapore for the company, much more than the national recycling rate for glass, which stands at a mere 19 per cent. 

Leow says that APB is keen to work with government and industry partners to raise the glass recycling rate in the country. 

For these and other efforts such as making its glass bottles lighter and recycling the paper labels on them, APB has won several awards from the Packaging Council of Singapore, which rewards innovative and creative packaging design through the Singapore Packaging Awards.

APB has also invested in other emissions reduction measures such as renewable energy; a rooftop solar installation as big as three football pitches on its Singapore brewery implemented November 2015 means that all Tiger beer consumed in the city-state is “brewed by the sun”, according to the company. 

The 8,000-odd solar panels will produce about 2.3 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of solar power annually, enough to meet the annual power use of 600 four-room apartment flats. It will also shrink APB’s carbon footprint by a fifth and help it save 1,500 tons of emissions a year.

Read more at: Future Ready Singapore

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