By Susan Kraemer •
October 17, 2009
Some of the landfill gas at McCarty Road Landfill in Texas was captured for sale to a local utility, but the rest was just getting flared. Now, though, Ameresco Services captures that excess and sends it four miles through an underground pipeline to Anheuser-Busch brewery to meet their goal of getting 15 percent of their needs by 2010 promised a few years ago.
How much business is there to be made in capturing and using waste energy? Well, the company that developed the energy recycling waste-to-power system that helps fuel the biopower plant at the brewery has got to be one of the few companies in this economy to enjoy 47% growth over the last 5 years!
By Adam Williams •
December 24, 2008
St. Louis, Mo., rates as one of the dirtiest cities — in the bottom 10 percent — in the United States “in terms of air releases of recognized carcinogens,” according to scorecard.org.
It pains me to have to put more horrifying news about St. Louis out to the world. If anyone not from St. Louis, my home city, thinks anything of this historic, blues-music thrumming, Gateway Arch-boasting, Stan Musial-loving, Mississippi River-guarding city, it’s likely about the city’s position in the annual “most dangerous city” rankings.
Beer and alligators? Sounds like a dangerous mix, or, at the very least, the beginning of a bad Cajun joke. For Anheuser-Busch’s (whoops… Anheuser-Busch InBev’s) Jacksonville, FL brewery and turf farm, this mix of wildlife and business has been standard for eleven years. The Jacksonville facility is one of ten A-B operations certified as Wildlife at Work (SM) sites by the Wildlife Habitat Council.
The WHC is a twenty-year-old partnership between corporations (A-B was a founding member) and environmental organizations (the American Farmland Trust, Izaak Walton League of America, National Wildlife Federation and World Wildlife Fund). The organization was founded in order to “…[help] large landowners, particularly corporations, manage their unused lands in an ecologically sensitive manner for the benefit of wildlife.” The Wildlife at Work program not only certifies wildlife restoration programs, but also provides step-by-step training for companies interested in making unused lands more friendly to animal and plant life.
By Ariel Schwartz •
July 30, 2008
But is it greenwashing?
Anheuser-Busch, the largest brewer in the US, announced today that its breweries will rely on renewable energies for 15 percent of their needs by 2010. The Houston brewery plans to use biogas from a nearby landfill combined with an on-site bio-energy recovery system (BERS) that will make use of brewing wastewater, and the Fairfield, California facility will use solar panels in addition to a BERS. The other US breweries will use only BERS.
When the facilities are completed, 10 out of the 12 Anheuser-Busch breweries in the US will use alternative fuels.
It’s tempting to shake our heads and exclaim that this is just another example of meaningless corporate greenwashing. But that might not be entirely true.
