I like beer sooooo much, but lately I have developed a round belly which amuses my friends a lot. But I never thought of how much waste the beer industry generates.
Luckily we have some scientists in Europe which already thought of a way to recycle the waste grains and wastewater and use it to fuel the beer production. Since the year 2000, as production grew a lot and the restrictions of disposal increased, the European capitals of beer production have faced a big challenge in their activity: where to dispose so much waste?
Scientist Wolfgang Bengel said that “Beer making is energy intensive – you boil stuff, use hot water and steam and then use electric energy for cooling – so if you recover more than 50 percent of your own energy costs from the spent grain that’s a big saving.”
Bengel, the technical director at German biomass company BMP Biomasse Projekt, was inspired by China and Thailand who were producing energy from rice and cane waste. He made a partnership with German companies INNOVAS, specialized in biogas plants, BISANZ, who brought the engineering know-how, and the Slovakian company Adato, that is specialized in boilers for waste heat and co-generation plants. The partnership realized a test plant which uses formal waste steam and turns it into energy. Now they are looking for contracts to implement their idea into breweries that want to transform their loses into gain, by re-using some of the generated energy.
The brewery waste recycling idea is not new. Anheuser-Busch uses it’s Bio-Energy Recovery Systems(which traps nutrients from wastewater and turn them into energy) for years and 9 brewering out of 12 from US are using the system. Also the brewery from Wuhan, China uses the system, supplying 15% of the fuel needs.
