Quick Tips for Recycling Your Brewery Waste

Want to green up your home brewery a bit?  Don’t really care about all that “green” stuff?  Either way, you might be surprised at just how easy it is to eliminate all of your brewery waste that would otherwise end up in a landfill. With a few adjustments, reusing or recycling almost everything can quickly become part of your normal brewing routine.

Here are some of the major culprits and a few tips for dealing with them.

1. Leftover Ingredients – Spent Grain, Hops and Yeast.  Build a simple compost bin and put all of your leftover ingredients in it.  Grain right out of the mash tun or steeping bag, hops/break material/excess wort from the boil kettle and leftover yeast/trub/beer from the fermenter – it all goes in the bin.  Add some grass clippings or leaves to balance the ratio of green to brown matter if you are disposing of lots of grain.  Your hop plants will thank you.
2. Waste Water – There are lots of ways to reduce your water usage in the brewery.  If you brew a couple of times per month it can even make a difference in your water bill.
   • Catch run-off from your wort chiller in a couple of spare buckets – use it for cleanup or watering plants.
   • Use a small pump to recirculate ice water when the wort temperature gets to about 100 ºF – this will reduce overall water consumption and chill your wort even faster.
   • Build a carboy/keg washer – like this one – which uses a small amount of water.
   • Switch to a no-rinse sanitizer like Star-San.
3. Packaging Materials – Check with your local Dept. of Waste Management, but much of the plastic/foil packaging can be recycled.
   • If you don’t have curb-side pickup, just save it all in a bin and make a trip to the recycling center when its full.
   • Buy ingredients in bulk.  Besides reducing the amount of packaging, you will usually get a better price on larger quantities of grain, extract and hops.

Pretty basic stuff and pretty easy to do.  The next frontier is capturing the waste you don’t see, like CO2 from the fermenters.  Just imagine how sweet it would be if you could use all of that free co2 to refill to bottle on your kegerator.  The person that cracks that code is going to be rich…

Got any other easy tips for recycling around the brewery?  Share ‘em up in the comments so we can all learn.

Tagged as: brewery, compost, recycle, waste