Lion New Zealand, which holds close to 30* per cent of the country’s alcohol beverage market, becomes New Zealand’s first large scale beverage company to be Toitū carbonzero certified.
Through their partnership with Toitū, Lion has undertaken an intensive audit, designed to accurately measure its operational greenhouse gas emissions and put in place strategies to manage and reduce Lion’s carbon footprint each year.
Lion has established a ‘whole family’ carbon reduction approach across its New Zealand manufacturing sites. This includes The Pride and Little Creatures Brewery in Auckland, Panhead Brewery and Havana Coffee Works in Wellington, Wither Hill’s Vineyard and Winery in Blenheim, Speight’s and Emerson’s Breweries based in Dunedin, along with its nationwide chain of Liquor King stores.
“Our certification will require the business to reduce emissions year on year, measured against set targets, one of which is our commitment to running all of our Lion sites across the country on renewable electricity by 2025,” says Glass.
As a final lever, and where emissions cannot be reduced at this time, Lion have purchased verified carbon credits from two offsetting initiatives; a forest protection and regeneration project in the South Island and a renewable energy farm in India.
Becky Lloyd, Chief Executive of Toitū Envirocare says, “I applaud Lion’s decision to achieve Toitū carbonzero certification for their operations and key product lines. Lion is leading by example, and demonstrating long-term commitment to transforming their business in line with changing consumer needs for climate-friendly, low carbon products. We’re proud to support Lion in their ongoing commitment to taking credible climate action, grounded in science.”
The certification builds on work already undertaken at The Pride, Lion’s largest multi-beverage facility, by the Lion Energy Deployment Team to improve optimisation and drive production efficiencies reducing emissions. Some initiatives include; optimisation of cleaning process, improved process heat utilisation (such as boiling and pasteurisation), improving refrigeration systems by both controls and storage temperature requirements.
Kat McDonald, Lion Sustainability Manager says: “Through the certification audit it became quite clear that we couldn’t improve what we couldn’t see, highlighting the need for a metering system at our major manufacturing sites. Once we knew what the major emission sources were, we could establish weekly energy reports working against our targets for optimisation. In the last year alone, our energy expenditure per litre of beer went down by 4 per cent and will continue to reduce in 2021,” says McDonald.
The carbonzero certification applies to Lion the organisation, and thus far two individual brands have also achieved carbonzero certification for their entire product life cycle, The Fermentist in 2019 and Steinlager late last year.
Alongside certification, Lion has also signed up to EECA’s Energy Transition Accelerator (ETA) Programme which assists large energy users in developing a strategic long-term road map to decarbonisation by focusing on energy efficiency, emerging technology, renewable fuels and electrification of process heat.
ENDS
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