Beer Is Good

For Health and Environment

Environmental Issues – Beer and Health: two words that wouldn’t normally agree with each other, have come together in an unlikely alliance. La Crosse, Wisconsin’s City Brewery is wasting absolutely nothing as its brewing byproducts are used to create three million Kilowatt hours per year by introducing a new process that captures, cleans, and burns byproducts through an engine called a jenbacher.

Not far from City Brewery is Gundersen Lutheran Health System – credited for the electricity that the brewery creates. Only accounting for about thirteen percent of their total electric use, City Brewery is helping the medical group achieve energy independence. If everything goes as planned, this could happen as soon as 2014. And according to Gundersen Lutheran, the hospital is receiving enough energy to power about 300 homes!! This extremely environmentally conscious medical group also incorporated wind power as a renewable energy source. Way to f***ing go.

Not only does City’s new system benefit the hospital, but the heat created from the jenbacher which works off the brewery’s waste water treatment process – is extremely beneficial. The new system does a great deal to contribute to the slowing of climate change, an issue that has been crapped on by so many other businesses. A report based on the IEA climate change said, “The central problem is that most industrial infrastructure currently in existence – the fossil-fuelled power stations, the emissions-spewing factories, the inefficient transport and buildings – is already contributing to the high level of emissions, and will do so for decades.”

Luckily, the Renewable Energy Markets Association introduced a new program to encourage organizations to buy renewable energy for the next five years. Austin Texas, of all places, was one of the first to commit to the pledge-ranking as the largest city government in the country to convert to renewable energy 100 percent.

Read more at the Huffington Post.