ENVIORMENT

Water Conservation

Water is a key ingredient in beer and vital to life on the planet, which is why Anheuser-Busch is committed to conserving and protecting this precious natural resource from Seed to Sip.

Seed – At our Seed Research Facility in Fort Collins, Colorado, we are working to identify barley seed that can use up to 40% less water for the same yield.

Agriculture – Through our SmartBarley project, we work with barley farmers across the country to help them benchmark their inputs and outputs and improve their performance.  We’ve also partnered with the University of Idaho and the Bureau of Reclamation to install 9 Agrimet stations in key barley growing regions in Southern Idaho and Montana.  The stations deliver real-time weather data to growers of barley and other crops to help them water smarter.  The pilot program helped growers reduce their water use between 9 and 23 percent.

Watershed – Each year our employees in all of our brewery markets as well as several other Anheuser-Busch facility locations join local partners to improve rivers, lakes, and beaches.  We remove thousands of pounds of trash and debris, remove invasive species, plant trees and native grasses to improve filtration and run off, and more.  Additionally, we’ve partnered with The Nature Conservancy in Fort Collins, CO to help prevent future catastrophic forest fires both by analyzing and implementing a demonstration of forest management practices.  We’ve partnered with California Trout to restore hydrological function in the Mammoth Lakes Basin as one of the sources of water that ultimately reaches Los Angeles.

Brewery – We’ve made great strides to reduce our water use in our breweries.  Through innovation, technology, and commitment from our employees, we’ve reduced our water use by nearly 50% over the last 10 years at our U.S. breweries.

We make strategic reductions to our fiber,aluminum and glass packaging which has significant benefits to the environment.  Since 2009, we’ve reduced the material in our packaging by more than 75,000 tons.  This helps:

– Reduce the depletion of natural resources,

– Reduce the greenhouse gas emissions to create the packaging, and

– Reduce the waste that goes to recycling streams or landfills.

The Anheuser-Busch Recycling Corporation was established in 1978 and has helped our company be a leading aluminum recycler.

Anheuser-Busch is committed to reducing the energy and emissions in both the brewing and transportation of our beers.

Our operations have reduced energy use by more than 25 percent since 2008 and today more than 11 percent of our energy is generated from renewable resources, including biomass, wind and landfill gas. Examples of how our state-of-the-art breweries are using innovative ways to source energy include:

Bio-Energy Recovery Systems (BERS): Anheuser-Busch is the world’s largest operator of BERS, a method of turning the nutrients in wastewater from the brewing process into renewable biogas. Used at ten U.S. breweries, BERS is responsible for generating approximately 8 percent of our fuel needs. Our communities also benefit from our use of BERS technology because it lowers the electricity demand on community wastewater treatment facilities by reducing organic material in the leftover water. Substituting biogas for fossil fuels also reduces brewery emissions of carbon dioxide and reduces other air pollutants that would result from community wastewater treatment facilities.

Landfill Gas: More than 60 percent of the Houston, TX brewery’s steam requirements are supplied by capturing biogas emitted from decomposing materials at area landfills. This alternative fuel option reduces the use of fossil fuels.

Solar and Wind Power: Solar arrays are located at our Newark, N.J., Fairfield, CA, and Cartersville, GA breweries as well as installations at our Eagle Packaging plant and our corporate offices in St. Louis. At peak production,the arrays provide 2.7 MW of electricity. The renewable energy from these arrays are sold to third parties.

In 2014,we commissioned a second wind turbine for our Fairfield, CA brewery. With the additional turbine online, the Fairfield brewery has the ability to produce more energy that it consumes, and exports the extra power back to the electrical grid

Nutri-Turf Farms: Located near the Jacksonville, FL and Fort Collins, CO breweries, Anheuser-Busch’s Nutri-Turf farms apply nutrient-rich leftover water from the brewing process to help grow crops.

Transportation Logistics: Anheuser-Busch aspires to be the brewing industry leader in sustainable logistics. To accomplish the mission, we focus on shipping the fewest loads possible at the lowest emission transportation methods.

We utilize our logistics planning systems to completely fill out each load to the legal limit, partner with over 30 other companies to share empty trailer space and eliminate empty miles, and constantly look to engineer solutions to service customer demand with the fewest miles possible.

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, our Houston brewery converted their entire fleet to 23% cleaner-burning Compressed Natural Gas engines. We have tripled the use of intermodal transportation over the past four years and recently added capabilities into the St. Louis brewery to ship train cars full of beer eliminating the need for up to four trucks per rail car shipped.