Brewer Molson Coors has cut almost half a million miles off its road transport in the UK and Ireland, according to the group’s corporate responsibility report.
The company’s brands include Carling, Cobra and Worthington’s as well as Coors.
The group said the savings in road transport equated to 600,000 kilos of CO2. In addition, it said waste improvements had saved 1,348 tonnes of waste to landfill in the last year; equivalent to the waste from 428 homes in one year.
The aim is to to divert all production waste away from landfill for each of its four UK breweries by the end of 2012.
Examples of moves in this direction include:
Waste from Sharp’s brewery in Rock, Cornwall is given to farmers. A dairy herd local to the Rock brewery eats 30 tonnes of spent grain every week, a pig farm takes five tonnes of the protein rich excess yeast, and Cornish beef cows drink up to 30 litres of waste beer a week.
The Tadcaster brewery uses an anaerobic digestion system, which treats wastewater to a high standard for disposal, generating biogas as a co-product.
In addition, a redesigned UK beer bottle will result in reduced overall packaging weight by 4,500 tons or 13 per cent of annual shipped product weight since its debut in 2006.
Globally, Molson Coors has joined Sedex (Supplier Ethical Data Exchange), a membership organisation for businesses committed to continuous improvement of the ethical performance of their supply chains. Over the next three years the target is to roll out Sedex to its top 100 suppliers.
