Brewing beer requires large amounts of energy, agricultural ingredients, packaging material, water, and labor – all to ferment it and pour it into a single glass. These diverse touchpoints allow breweries to pursue many different facets of sustainability in our business: energy efficiency, water stewardship, supply chain management, waste management, wastewater diversion, carbon emissions and more.
Here at Land-Grant, sustainability has been one of the founding principles of our business model. From when we first began brewing, we diverted our grain and invested in philanthropic beer collaborations to benefit the community. We have worked to prioritize sustainability, putting practices in place that reduce the amount of energy we use, the amount of waste we create, and the way we think about doing business. We formalized these efforts in 2017 as our Sun-Grant Sustainability Program, and these efforts have grown with us as a brewery.
Sustainability Highlights
PAKTECH RECYCLING IN COLUMBUS
We are proud to have become Columbus’s first collection center for recycling these plastic handles. Simply drop your PakTechs in the designated bins in our Taproom and we’ll take it from there! This recycling service is open to both individuals and local businesses.
ELECTRIC VEHICLE SALES FLEET UPGRADE
When our local sales rep noted putting in more than 10,000 miles of car travel in during the first quarter of 2021, a shift to electric vehicles became a top priority in reducing our carbon footprint. As an Acceleration Partner with Smart Columbus, we assessed our EV opportunities and successfully electrified our sales vehicle with the purchase of a Chevy Volt. Not only does this eliminate the emissions from the mileage, but the EV is charged from our renewable electricity – essentially reducing the carbon footprint of our local sales team’s travel to zero.
NATIVE PLANTS & RAIN BARREL INSTALLATION
Native plants are flora found naturally in the place where they first evolved, meaning they require less water, benefit pollinators and thrive in their current climate. This summer, we planted more than a dozen varieties of native plants in partnership with our neighbors at the bee collective. You can explore the varieties of native plants in our Beer Garden via QR codes found in the planter boxes.
We also installed a rain barrel to collect roof runoff to both reduce the amount of water that flows from our property and use it for irrigation of the native plants.
REIMPLEMENTATION OF UTILITY TRACKING
Using resources and tools provided by the Brewers Association, we are able to compare our usage with other breweries of similar size to help us set goals to achieve more efficient operations by creatively managing our resources and being conscious of our consumption in our brewing process.
Our Sun-Grant Sustainability Program is inspired by the Sun-Grant Association, a group of Land-Grant Universities that research and develop sustainable and environmentally friendly bio-based energy alternatives.
Through Sun-Grant, we seek to address common themes within the world of sustainability: reduction of greenhouse gases, closing loops, minimizing waste, decreasing our water use intensity, diverting brewing byproduct from our wastewater, lowering the impact of our supply chain, and partnering with different farmers, environmental organizations and community groups throughout our city and state to make a healthier, better, cleaner world.
While we know there is always more work to be done, we are extremely proud of the business we’ve become in pursuit of sustainability, combating climate change and meaningfully contributing to our community.