22 Apr Keen on Green at Muskoka Brewery
THE BREWERY Earth Day, 2019 – Surrounded by endless lakes and forests, we’re looking around every corner of the brewery to discover new ways to up our green game. With our Green Team leading the charge in research and development, we’re constantly seeking new innovations to improve our environmental footprint and inspire our team to do the same at work and beyond.
Going Green
The Green Team’s charter: We are Muskoka Brewery’s Green Team. Our commitment is to continuously improve our brewery’s environmental footprint and make our mark by sustainably brewing beers that support our local communities. The beer we brew today will protect our planet for the beer drinkers of tomorrow.
New! Our short can four-packs are now packaged in fully recyclable cardboard boxes. Like the six, eight and twelve pack boxes, these are produced with 3-12% pre-consumer and 7-14% post consumer waste.
New! We’ve replaced plastic jug water stations with a hard piped system that uses carbon filtration and encourages use of re-usable water bottles.
New! Continuing to add access points to recycling centres around the brewery to encourage usage. Our marked blue bins ensure that our staff’s plastics and papers are properly sorted. We try to divert as much as we can from the landfill and increasing access is essential to reinforcing this habit.
New! The Earth Month Challenge raises awareness and encourages habits among our staff to reduce one-use items and energy consumption. Points are counted for litterless lunches, re-usable water bottles and mugs, proper recycling, turning off devices and going one step further to go green.
New! We’ve been composting our staff kitchen biodegradable waste for a while and now we’re adding a larger collection unit outside to begin the conversion process on site.
New! Some of the fruit we use in our brews come to us in metal drums. We send these to All Ontario Recycling to be upcycled as scrap metal.
2018: We win an Elsie award for Environmental Commitment from the LCBO, recognizing our efforts to support fresh waters with the Evergreen Fresh Water Grants Program.
We focus our efforts on finding ways to reduce water use – i.e., we turn off the Hot Liquid Tank before every weekend. By doing so, we are saving anywhere between 400-800hL of water!
All of our plastic cups are sourced from 100% recyclable materials.
Online pay stubs (decreasing paper use).
Trail Days with Muskoka Conservancy where we clean up freshwater areas like UpJohn Nature trail.
We reuse good-on-sided paper to create recycled notebooks.
Used corrugated pallets are picked up by Woodbridge Pallet and being diverted from the landfill.
Malt bags are re-purposed as kindling bags by The Old Mill Firewood Supply in Bracebridge and as produce bags for Eat Local Muskoka, our local food co-op.