The giant brewery company Diageo, has announced that it is on target to achieve its ambitious goal of cutting carbon emissions by 50% from 2007 to 2015. This week it reported that it has already reduced its carbon footprint by more than 25%.
Despite the fact that there only remains two years until the deadline for the target, Michael Alexander, the head of environment at Diageo, is confident that they will still be successful. Stating that the 26% cut in emissions since 2007, has been made at a time when they have also grown substantially, with far greater production now compared to six years ago; net sales grew by 38% from 2011 to 2013.
Speaking to businessGreen he explained that "cutting it by 26 per cent thus far is a very big achievement, and we'll do our very best to hit the 50 per cent mark by 2015. We've got a big roadmap of projects in place over the next 18 months that will get us a long way to achieving 50 per cent if they're all implemented. It's been a big investment from our part in time and effort."
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Renewable energy is playing a big part of their carbon emission reduction scheme, specifically projects such as the £17 million bioenergy plant at the Roseisle Scotch whiskey distillery in Scotland.
The Bioenergy Plant attached to the Roseisle Scotch whiskey distillery. (e-architect)
Since opening in 2010, the plant has been able to generate half of Roseisle's electricity, helping to reduce the site's carbon footprint by nearly 13,000 tonnes a year. The first of its kind in the world, the plant uses a range of clean technologies, including an anaerobic digestion tank to convert by products of the whiskey into methane, which is then used to fuel a biomass boiler.
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Based on the success of the facility Diageo has already opened another bioenergy plant at the St Croix distillery in the US Virgin Islands, and is now set to open an even larger £65 million bioenergy plant at the Cameronbridge distillery in Scotland, later in 2013, which it hopes will cut total company CO2 emissions by more than 5% by the end of next year.
Alexander also revealed that the company will replicate this bioenergy success at some of its African breweries which produce Guinness in Cameroon, Nigeria, and Ghana. He said, "we've obviously been working on reducing energy and water consumption in our African breweries already, but, once you've got programmes in place to continue that, then you've got to look at alternative energy sources, and that might well be something not too dissimilar to what we've done elsewhere in the world. We're looking at all opportunities there, but we're certainly learning from our opportunities in distilling."
By. Joao Peixe of Oilprice.com
Joao is a writer for Oilprice.com More