Molson Coors expects to achieve its UK target of sending zero waste to landfill by the end of this year, according to a report into its 2011 environmental performance.
Supply chain director Lee Finney said: “We’re proud that we are well on course to achieve zero-landfill waste this year but we are not about to rest on our laurels. We understand the need to build on this success which is why we are announcing ambitious targets for 2020 in water and energy efficiency across our whole supply chain.”
By the end of 2011, the brewer decreased by 51 per cent the amount of waste it sends to landfill since it began a review in 2007.
Molson Coors has set global environmental targets which include a 25 per cent improvement on energy efficiency and 20 per cent improvement on water efficiency by 2020 (on a 2011 baseline) with the UK contributing 22 per cent on energy and 15 per cent on water.
The brewer’s landfill diversion currently stands at 99.2 per cent which means almost 48,000 tonnes of waste was reused – for example in producing Marmite or as animal feed – or recycled in 2011.
As well as targeting landfill reduction, Molson Coors, has made a number of other environmental improvements such as the film wrap packaging used for small pack Carling instead of the more traditional cardboard packaging. A £6.3 million investment enabled the weight of secondary packaging to be reduced by 63 per cent and a carbon emission reduction of four per cent.
This year, it aims to reduce energy and water usage by 15 per cent by the end of 2012. It has built a waste water treatment plant at its Tadcaster brewery which has reduced water use to 3.3 pints per pint of beer. The bio-gas produced from the waste water treatment plant has replaced around 20 per cent of the natural gas used by the brewery.
And it has invested £1m at the Sharp’s Brewery in Cornwall to build an anaerobic digester to turn waste into bio-gas.