BRAZIL – AmBev, Brazil’s largest brewing company and part of global brewer AB InBev, has unveiled its first brewing and malting facility in Brazil.
Located in the South region of Brazil, the brewery and malting site achieved the carbon-neutral status after reducing 90% of their CO emissions and offsetting the remaining 10%.
The maker of Brahma, Bohemia, Stella Artois beer brands also plans to unveil another four carbon-neutral breweries before the end of 2021.
“This important step supports our efforts to achieve our ambitious 2025 Sustainability Goals, which aim to drive progress across our full, integrated supply chain,” says Rodrigo Figueiredo, Vice President of Sustainability and Procurement at Ambev.
“We developed our goals with the UN SDGs in mind and they are designed to tackle shared global environmental and social challenges. We focus on four areas where we can deliver the most value for the world and our company: agriculture, water, packaging, and climate.”
Over the past five years, AB InBev’s Brazil arm Ambev has invested around US$25m in sustainable operations.
Its drive to cut emissions from its supply chain however dates back to 2003 and the company says that since then, it has been able to cut down emissions across its direct operations by 63%.
The company’s current 2025 Sustainability goals include purchasing 100% of electricity from renewable sources and reducing CO emissions across the value chain by 25%.
The 2025 sustainability goals also include plans to make all packaging returnable or made from majority recycled content.
As major food and beverage companies commit themselves to net-zero goals, a new crop of carbon-neutral facilities has been cropping up across the globe.
In the beer industry, Danish multinational brewer Carlsberg and its European counterpart Diageo have all unveiled carbon neutral facilities in recent months.
Carlsberg announced in May that its Sinebrychoff brewery in the Netherlands had become carbon neutral, running on 100% renewable energy.
A few months later in September, British multinational alcoholic beverages company Diageo opened its first carbon neutral whiskey distillery in North America as part of goal to become net-zero carbon across direct operations by 2030.
According to Diageo, the new facility located in Lebanon, Kentucky will operate using 100% renewable electricity, zero fossil fuels for production, and virtual metering technology.
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