A Green Brewery An industry with long-standing sensitivity to the environment
The brewing industry in Quebec has long been relatively green. It’s the only industry that recovers and reuses its containers. Most breweries recycle their spent grain husks and yeast as animal feed. Packaging is of recycled and recyclable cardboard. The brown bottles generally used to bottle local beer are reused up to 17 times and have a useful life of about four years. Not bad for starters! The bottles of imported beers, despite the deposit collected on them, are not reused.
But at Boréale we like to push the envelope. We were ecology-minded back when greens were called granola people. We were the first to produce an all-natural beer. We owe the quality of our ingredients, and therefore of our beer, to mother nature, so it follows that right from the beginning we looked for new ways to lighten our tread on the environment.
Reuse and recycling
We were the first to provide customers and partners with No. 5 recyclable plastic glasses and the first to convert our vehicle fleet to hybrid power. Before we had been in business five years, our brewery was using unconventional geothermal energy. Boréale recycles or rehabilitates almost 96% of the waste and residue it produces.
Tree-huggers and proud of it
The second expansion of our Blainville brewery added almost 25,000 square feet of warehousing and production space. Since clearing trees to facilitate construction was out of the question, we turned to a forestry engineer to help us protect the surrounding woods from the comings and goings of construction machinery.
Almost 40 mature trees were transplanted to make room to pour the foundations. We changed the building plans to accommodate a 100-year-old hemlock that could not be moved. This work won us recognition as finalists in the “Entreprise citoyenne” (citizen enterprise) contest organized by L’Actualité, the leading Quebec newsmagazine.
Hydro-Québec pays tribute to Les Brasseurs du Nord, grand prize winner of the 2009 ENERGY WISE competition of Excellence.
The expansion was an opportunity to make the building more energy-efficient. To limit power consumption we installed several avant-garde technologies: a solar wall; an unconventional geothermal energy supply; recovery of heat from the vat-cooling system; a system to optimize water use; a system of sensors to measure carbon dioxide concentration so the fermentation-hall ventilation system can switch on when needed rather than twice hourly as required by regulation.
Green packaging
When we redesigned our packaging in 2008, the 20th anniversary of Boréale and Boréale Rousse, we looked at production methods and life cycle as well as design. Our new cases are still made of recycled and recyclable cardboard. Our new labels are printed on non-metallic paper to reduce the aluminum content of the waste water from our bottle-washing.
In a North American first, we print our labels with vegetable inks on paper made from 100% FSC-certified pulp. Certification by the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) is like an environmental ISO standard. It guarantees that the chain of production of our labels, from log harvesting to printing, is consistent with sustainable development.
Brewing beer, brewing values
Because we believe in our dreams and strive to live our values, we can be realistic and ask for the impossible. That’s part of what it means to be 100% Boréale.
