Individual Project Finale

Reflection on Zero-Waste Brewing 

My individual project was a success in many ways, the most notable being that it made me more aware of the importance of small actions and forced me to re-think how I live. Brewing beer popped into my head after a month of bottles piled up in my new apartment and made me aware of how much waste I am responsible for everyday. Even if I did plan to recycle the bottles, research found that most beer bottling companies only utilize 12.5% recycled glass¹. Being short on cash but high in energy, I decided to brew my own!

Successes:

• 3 awesome batches of homebrewed beer!
• Went from recycling or throwing out ~45 bottles per month in my household to zero, beginning in September.
• Approximately 135 bottles saved
• Re-purposed about 75% of water required to brew  (~ 18 gallons)
• Incorporated spent grains (usually a waste product) into cookies, granola, and baked goods
• Shared bottling equipment

                                            First batch complete- Belgian Witbier in re-used bottles

Quantitative Aspects Reflection:

The project ‘s biggest quantitative success was the approximately 135 bottles saved. This not only saves glass and the energy involved in making new bottles, but also heavy transportation costs, labeling and packaging costs, and costs associated with making the purchase itself (more gas, miles etc). It also means that my roommate and I will save ~540 bottles each year that I brew, and after tasting how delicious home brew can be, I am planning on continuing for a long time, meaning even more savings in these categories in the future.

 

                 New Belgium Brewing Co. 37.6% of calculated carbon footprint due to glass bottling 

                    http://www.newbelgium.com/sustainability/stories/14-02-28/A-Snapshot-of-our-Footprint.aspx

Half of the brewing equipment (all the bottling gear) was borrowed from a friend who also brews- saving me around $60 and saving a considerable amount of excess plastic. Since each of us only need the equipment 1 day a month it makes more sense to work out a sharing program between local brewers rather than each person having a full set of equipment.

Because I began to require more bottles as I brewed consecutive batches, friends saved bottles for me and started trading me homemade food and wine for beer! Sharing and trading are at the heart of any strong community and brewing via this project has helped solidify more personal bonds and piqued considerable interest among acquaintances.

Re-used approximately 18 gallons of waste water used to clean brewing equipment to wash my dishes and clean my bathtub- now a monthly routine.

After the first batch of beer, I began to incorporate spent grains into cookies, granola, and waffles, producing almost zero waste from the process. I even use the malt containers as cookie jars!

Qualitative Aspect Reflection:

This success of this project was not only focused on quantitative components, but also on the many additional lessons learned throughout the project that corresponded with topics discussed in class. The combination of learning about the larger importance of water and energy conservation, cultivating greener, food secure communities, and waste reduction and recycling while focusing on a zero-waste project helped me to understand these concepts on both a macro and micro level. While in class we tended to focus on the wider effects of policy on communities, regions, and the world, my individual project was also teaching me how to be a conscious citizen of the earth without any policy implementation.   

Forcing myself to plan ahead to brew as sustainably as possible seeped into other aspects of my life and made me acutely aware of wasteful water use behavior and food waste in other aspects of my life. For instance, I noticed that after successfully incorporating wet grains into baked goods, almost all the ‘borderline’ food in my fridge could also be used in other forms instead of tossed into the garbage.  I also noticed that by trying to find ways to re-purpose water, that I began thinking of saving water in other aspects of my daily routine. Completing this project with the goal of zero-waste made me think more about the brewing process overall and also drew my attention to how much waste I produce that I never acknowledged, and ideas to reduce these numbers.

 A delicious way to incorporate a byproduct of the brewing process into brewing routine!

Problems

The main problem that I’ve found with trying to accomplish zero-waste brewing is the energy lost through heat during the boiling process.  I’ve found that during the winter an easy solution to re-using the heat energy given off during brewing can be used to heat my apartment temporarily.  Between the stovetop heat from extended boils and the heat from baking with the spent grains, my small apartment heats up pretty nicely for about 4 hours. Not a lot of savings but it’s a little more sustainable. Also, for my next batch I am planning to use the cold winter weather to my advantage and brew a lager. Lagers require at least 6 weeks of refrigeration (expensive and energy intensive)…or the temperature of a poor students’ apartment in an Indiana winter.

Future Impact/Statistics:

Statistics show that the average college student drinks 7.44 alcoholic beverages per week². Even if we attribute only half of that to beer (bottled or canned) that accounts for 15,475,200 beer containers/year on the IU Bloomington campus alone. If everyone brewed their own beer, the saving in glass, aluminum, energy, transportation, packaging, trash pickup etc, the saving to the environment and society would be immense! I don’t think that a huge number of college students would have the time or interest that home brewing takes, but it is fairly easy, requires very little equipment and depending on what type of ingredients you use, can be significantly less expensive than purchasing beer from the store- and that is not including the externalities mentioned above.

This project has forced me to analyze every decision in a fairly complex process and use creativity to find the most sustainable solutions to an array of different behaviors. 

1 New Belgium Brewing Co.http://www.newbelgium.com/sustainability/stories/14-02-28/A-Snapshot-of-our-Footprint.aspx.

2 Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Studies-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3394678/
3 NCES (2014). U.S. Department of Education  "Fast Facts Enrollment"

Final Course Reflection

The first day of class you said something that stuck in my head, and I think it will continue to stick with me for a long time. You said that experience is nothing without reflection. I’ve had a lot of experiences in my life, but that one stray comment made me wonder just how often I had really stopped to reflect upon those experiences, and if they would have been richer had I just paused. It’s nagged me all semester and while I don’t have an answer as to previous experiences, I do know that this class made me stop and think, and that’s a lesson that I think we all need to be reminded of from time to time in our lives.

Overall Impression

The format of the class was innovative and a welcome breath of fresh air in the rip tide of regular grad classes. It was especially refreshing after coming back from working in the real world for a couple of years and suddenly faced with the façade of student life where pride seems to come in the form of letter grades. The class format might not work for everyone, but I found it very useful and it encouraged me to study harder and reflect more deeply than exam based courses.  

Understanding of Sustainability

Prior to this class, sustainability was a term that I had heard thrown around a lot, but a concept that felt too big and expansive to properly define.  After taking this course, completing my individual project and working on the STAR community report for the City, I feel that while sustainability remains a very expansive term, it is something that I am constantly aware of now and actively striving toward in a vast array of thoughts and forms. My personal project of sustainable brewing forced me to look at sustainability from a variety of perspectives and levels that I never would have believed possible.

Course Projects

In planning my independent project, the most basic aspects of conserving, recycling and reusing came easily, while re-thinking sustainable approaches took a greater effort, more creativity and made the topic more interesting to me. A bigger picture began to form as each minor detail such as water re-use, glass recycling, cooking with spent grains, sharing communal equipment initiated an incremental lifestyle change. I started researching each topic separately, and while each topic was relatively minor on its own, each aspect emerged as something larger in the end. I noticed that drawing attention to how much water I could re-use in brewing changed my overall consumption of water, and my boyfriend’s consumption as well.   Relying on other people for equipment allowed me to make connections with new people who not only had lots of helpful advice, but also more equipment to share. Around the same time I began sharing my car with a friend and finally put my apartment on the couchsurfing website to reciprocate for all the couches I’ve bummed during my travels. Learning to cook with wet spent grains encouraged me to pay more attention to other food I was throwing out that could be re-purposed with a little creativity.  I began to see that sustainability is not just about changing policy, but our everyday behavior, and most importantly, our very way of thinking.

Course Content

Many of the articles that we read, especially those that focused on the economic perspective of carbon use, climate change and natural resources impacted me the most deeply. Those articles did not just focus on what individuals can do, but proposed that we think about the world differently. If we begin to see a world with a definitive limit, that GDP always adds and never subtracts, that it is bizarre to tax everything except limited resources, that scare resources are used to the detriment of the planet while a nearly inexhaustible labor market goes under-utilized to the detriment of people, the world begins to look different, and questions begin to surface. With questions inevitably come answers, and more questions. In cases like this, it is the questions themselves that can change the world. The little routine choices that we make everyday matter too, but for me, it is learning to question the root of the issues that made this topic and class so useful to me. While I’m sure many of the facts we’ve discussed in class will fade, the questions will not. I think that is the best type of education we can receive, the type that motivates us to learn more, to constantly seek to find answers, discuss frequently, until we change things in the process.

Thanks for everything, I really enjoyed this class and appreciate all your insight. Hope to stay in touch and please feel free to let me know if you need any help on local sustainability initiatives, I’m always happy to help out!