I can’t resist commenting on this post as it combines two of my favorite things in life, renewable energy and beer. Eric Fitch of PurposeEnergy has found a way reduce and reuse waste streams created in the beer production process. While the approach of reducing waste in a production process is not new, Eric has found a market that produces organic waste that can be transformed into clean energy and even help fuel the production process. This is similar to the model Brazil uses to produce sugar ethanol for cars (which you technically can also drink). In Brazil, the stalks and waste from the sugar fields are used to fuel the ethanol production, which is one reason it is cheaper and has a better carbon footprint than US produced corn ethanol. Let’s hope that more breweries realize the benefits PurposeEnergy can provide, giving us all just one more excuse to drink beer, “I’m saving the environment!”
… Fitch’s aim is for his company, Arlington, MA-based PurposeEnergy, to excel in the beer market, and then let its first customers become the startup’s loudest advocates as it expands into other industries.
Brewing and bottling beer creates organic byproducts at almost every step of the process, from spent grain and yeast to protein deposits. The resulting waste is mostly water with a high concentration of solids, which companies have to pay to transport offsite to treatment facilities that charge by the pound to make the water safe enough for disposal.
PurposeEnergy, incorporated in 2007, has come up with system that uses a process called anaerobic digestion to turn the byproducts from brewing into renewable fuels. Installed on-site at a brewery, the “PurposeEnergy Biogas Facility” would convert much of the organic waste into methane, the main component of the natural gas that most breweries use to fuel their plants. In doing so, it would cut costs for energy and byproduct remediation by about 40 percent at its first brewery partner, according to Fitch, PurposeEnergy’s CEO. Fitch developed the technique as a hybrid of a few different anaerobic digester methods mostly used in farming, a world that Fitch is familiar with, having grown up in Wyoming…. (for full article see http://bit.ly/aMMnL6)
