Food and drink waste is a major environmental issue.

Pre-covid, 1.3 trillion tons of food went to landfills each year. Beyond polluting our planet, it creates 10% of all global greenhouse gas emissions (Deloitte, 2021; Our World in Data, 2020)

Covid-19 made the situation far worse.

As global supply chains ground to a halt, billions of tons of food goods began to deteriorate, creating a food waste crisis.

A keg of beer has a shelf-life of 120 days. In 2020, with bars being forced to remain shut, owners were forced to pour 87 millions of pints of beer down the drain in the UK alone - an estimated loss of £331 million in revenue (British Beer & Pub Association, 2021).

Bars were haemorrhaging money at a critical moment and adding to the food waste crisis.

Something had to be done.

Heineken has publicly pledged to become carbon neutral in its beer production by 2030.

Moreover, the company made a commitment at the start of the pandemic to help save bars worldwide.

To save bars, maintain the on-trade’s trust in Heineken, and to fulfil our environmental commitments, we needed to stop millions more pints from being poured down the drain.

How do you repurpose beer?

That was the question we posed to an international panel of environmental experts and Heineken’s sustainability experts.

The answers surprised us.

Even once expired, beer has a multitude of uses.

Biofuel. Fertiliser. Plastics. Animal feed.

Bartenders were throwing their expired beer away because they believed it was worthless.

But with just a few modifications to our production chain, spent beer could easily be transformed into a usable and sustainable resource.

Expired beer is not waste, we realised, it’s a resource we can harness to help communities get on their feet again.

Ideating alongside environmental experts and engineers, we set out to repurpose beer into a tool to help kickstart communities’, bars’ and Heineken’s recovery.

Heineken reversed their business model.

We bought back €8 million of beer from bars across markets and transformed it into sustainable solutions and resources for the community.

To help bars, help Heineken and help the environment.

Our experts designed and created a ‘beer saving station’ to convert expired beer into biogas by fermenting it in a digester.

The equivalent of 15 million pints were fed into our system.

In Cork, this biogas was used to power 1000 homes a day and heat a care home in the local community.

The process of fermenting beer into biogas also produces a valuable nutrient-rich fertiliser - of which Heineken was able to produce 4,600 tonnes.

This was part donated to the local community, part sold back to our suppliers.

Roughly 13 million pints of beer were transformed into animal feed.

The initiative also inspired our Spain brewery to transform 178,500 tonnes of byproducts into animal feed.

This wasn’t just a smart use of a waste product - animals fed with beer grains also emit 13% less greenhouse gases (ILVO, 2020).

All our initiatives were communicated through a series of tactical outdoors in the communities we were able to help.

The environmental results were astounding.

In total, we bought back over 28 million expired pints (19 million in Ireland, 9 million in England). Using innovative technologies, we generated enough sustainable power to heat 61,687 homes and produce 4,600 tonnes of fertiliser for our suppliers and the local community.

Our efforts did not go unnoticed.

The initiatives had huge PR value for Heineken, with an earned reach of over 67 million. Meanwhile, our media spend was tiny - just enough to cover a series of billboards.

Moreover, Heineken grew to position 16 out of 589 companies within the Food Products industry group of Morning Star’s Sustainalytics rankings.

Heineken also enjoyed a measurable growth in trust from the on-trade.

On average, our bar partners in markets were 4.9% more satisfied with Heineken in 2021 versus 2019 (Madison 2021). [Full disclosure - Heineken also concurrently ran the #BackTheBars campaign, which is likely to have also positively impacted satisfaction].

The Unwasted Beer project survives globally. Heineken continues to look for new uses for its spent beer, and beer by-products.