Scottish multinational brewery and pub chain BrewDog has recently purchased over 2,000 acres of farmland near Loch Lomond, where it aims to plant 1 million trees as the company declares itself double carbon negative. The brewer revealed the acquisition in its ‘Make Earth Great Again‘ plan to improve its environmental performance.
James Watt and Martin Dickie, the founders of BrewDog, explained:
At BrewDog, we thought we were doing our bit for the planet. But after meeting David Attenborough and hearing him deliver a talk on climate change, we started doing much more research into the matter. Then it hit us, the blindingly stark realization that we were not doing anything like enough.
The company announced that until it can remove a sufficient amount of its carbon emissions from the atmosphere via its farmland, it will donate an unspecified amount to ‘interim removal partners’ to remove double the amount of CO2 that BrewDog emits. Such partners would include organizations in Canada and Australia, and the UK’s Ribble Rivers Trust and Woodland Trust.
Currently, the land purchased by BrewDog is used for grazing, but the plan is to dedicate 550 acres to peatland restoration, which will act as a carbon sink, and 1500 to native broadleaf trees.
David Robertson, the director of Scottish Woodlands, said:
The BrewDog Forest will be one of the largest native woodlands created in the Uk for many years.
The brewer already employs green measures, such as recycling brewing waste into dog food, capturing CO2 from fermentation, and then using it to carbonate its beers, and powering pubs and productions with wind power. According to BrewDog, the carbon footprint of its business globally is at 67,951 tons of CO2 equivalent.
However, BrewDog hasn’t done this alone; Prof. Mike Berners-Lee, its chief scientific advisor and an expert on carbon footprint calculation, helped with this plan.
