Beer and the environment

A hardcore environmentalist has some serious reasons to consider not drinking beer, IMO. It is an incredibly inefficient use of resources for what is arguably not essential dietary needs, but rather just pretty much recreational consumption. There's a lot of transportation involved for ingredients, final product, etc. There's also the opportunity costs for the land that could have been used for grain to actually feed people, help keep prices down for essential crops, etc.

Look at the so-called eco-friendly breweries and notice what they say. Keep in mind most are not eco-friendly, so most breweries are using the eco-unfriendly practices.

All of the social stuff can be obtained over coffee or tea.

 

Farting is the least of our worries.

 

Though my wife would disagree.

 

See India and China's environmental impact and get back to me. CHEERS!

 

This is something i think about from time to time. All in all, it's a waste. It wastes food (although you could argue that those who need it couldn't buy it anyway) It's a waste of water, because beer is not really for sustenance, it's for pleasure/catching a buzz. Especially all of the good beers and wine made from stuff grown in California. I'd have to think the drought wouldn't be such a pain in the ass if folks out there strictly farmed for food and not mood enhancing corporeal pleasures. That said, I didn't make this world, i just live in it. And with that said, i will continue to drink and smoke all the good stuff that comes from Northern California and not feel too bad about it. If I wasn't consuming it, the next guy would. Still, props to companies like Sierra Nevada that really try to minimize environmental impact. I wish more breweries would strive for a symbiotic relationship with the environment. It's cool to hear about some breweries giving their spent grain to hog farms, or using wind or solar energy. We need more Uintas and Sierra Nevada types that care.

 

Shouldn't the pros and cons be switched, or did I miss something?

 

This is an interesting question, and actually not one that I've given much thought before.

As far as I can tell, pretty much any time you consume something you do some type of environmental harm. Some types are more or less harmful, but I think there's no way that beer is actually good for 'environmental health'. So really what we should be doing is looking for ways to offset the cost of consumption, and perhaps supporting breweries that are doing the same to minimise the harm.

Good thread.

 

why should we care about the environment when we could care about beer instead?

 

Seriously?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita

 

I think this question points beer drinkers in the right direction: How does the craft beer industry become a sustainable industry? Let's forget about "drinking less" or "consuming fewer ingredients" Instead of becoming less bad, how can we do more good...

Cans - Weigh less than glass, lower transportation costs and fuel consumption, easy to recycle, less broken glass in rivers

Organic, locally sourced ingredients - Strong beer-drinking communities have always revolved around a strong local economy. The small-batch, locally produced hops in Double Dose that were harvested from the University of Vermont are a higher quality than a mass produced, nutrient starved variety from an unsustainable source. We can just taste it. And why the hell do we allow the controlled dumping of chemicals on our beer ingredients? I don't know about you folks but I'd prefer water, barley, hops, and yeast.

 

This is going to anger many users; water vapor is far and away the most common and powerful greenhouse gas. It makes a larger percentage of the greenhouse effect than Carbon Dioxide, more than Methane, more than any other gas. With that in mind, beer is in big trouble. Much of what makes beer is the water, and what happens when you leave your glass to sit out? It evaporates and is turned into water vapor.

As for carbon dioxide, I honestly wouldn't worry about it. It's essential to life on earth and plants absolutely love it. We've seen much greater concentrations of the gas in the past, yet when it was at its peak, the earth was in the middle of an ice age. But let's pretend for a moment that we live in a world where pigs can fly, Mexico invades Nevada, and carbon dioxide is going to cause us to burn to a crisp. Well, we would greatly reduce its output by simply eliminating all forest fires and volcano eruptions, but that would be too bright of an idea. We can simply tell people not to breathe (what happens when you breathe out, you release carbon dioxide). But regarding beer, I can't think of a single way to make it "carbon free". Most beer already comes carbonated with carbon dioxide, so that's a problem. And even building a transportation device that runs "carbon free" often takes many breaths of human beings (remember, humans breathe out carbon dioxide) to build and operate.

 

You have to take into account that this chart is per capita, so overall population is going to have a dramatic impact on where countries fall. I'm not debating the accuracy, just think it's an important point.

 

This thread gave me cancer

 

The creation of that can is much more damaging to the environment than creating a glass bottle. Some research suggests that the can ultimately wins if the beer is being transported a long distance... and glass is preferable where transportation is slight. Given the current market, we are much less likely to buy canned beer from Europe than bottled European beer (and we're creating demand for our local breweries to can).

When not in a keg, beer is pretty much packaged in single use/single serving containers.

 

Oh is that how it works?

 

Uh, what? First off I will address your pros (cons)
- Is food more essential than oxygen? I'd be interested to find a study that suggests this. Plants contribute oxygen, so any plant is good in my book.
- Water is the most plentiful resource on the planet. It's not like the planet is worried about running out of it. Salt water, which is 70% of the earth's surface, can be filtered and distilled to fresh water. Also, your second post reiterated the first point you made so I won't readdress it.
- fossil fuels burning from the transportation of beer ingredients and bottles is less than minuscule compared to what gets expensed due to every other industry.
- carbon dioxide from beer is a byproduct, yes, but realistically, there is no threat to the environment from beer. There is simply not enough CO2 from beer released into the atmosphere to make any kind of difference.
-Methane - really? Do you honestly think farting has any kind of impact of the Earth? Even it it did, there are more cows farting than humans, so should we try to stop them or should we stop humans from consuming protein? Because a high protein diet produces more flatulence than beer does.
- Urination is sterile, it has 0 impact on the earth as a whole, the water used with a toilet is minuscule compared to a shower, washing clothes, or washing dishes. Should we stop doing that? Repeated urination on grass might kill it but only for a little while.

In short, no, Beer brewing, transporting, and ingesting has essentially 0 effect of the environment, I'm really not understanding this post at all. Human's are not the only contributing factor to the earth's well being, the earth actually screws itself. For example. a few years ago methane levels around the world increased simultaneously, the only possible cause of that would be from earthly actions. Not everything that a human touches is harmful to the earth.