Zhou Zhi Hua
2002
2001
In 1999, Shanghai Asia Pacific Brewery in China was using more than
9 litres of water to brew one litre of beer. Old and defective equip
ment and lack of facilities for reusing the waste water from the
brewery were to blame.
PUTTING WATER TOGOODUSE
'We had water meters installed because we
needed to know which part of the brewery
was using an unusually large volume of
water,' says Zhou Zhi Hua, who was in charge
of the brewery's water-saving programme
at the time. 'Only then could we start thinking
of solutions.'The meters revealed that the
pipes underneath the brewery were corrod
ed and were losing a huge amount of water.
Installing a new piping system above ground
solved this problem and helped the brewery
reduce its potable water consumption by
51,000 cubic metres a year, enough to meet
the annual water demand of 1,000 people in
a developed country. The meters also showed
how much potable water was being used to
remove sulphur dioxide from the emissions
from the boiler installation. But it is not
necessary to use drinking water to scrub the
gas, so the brewery started using its caustic
waste water to do this job, thereby reducing
its drinking water consumption by a further
41,000 cubic metres a year.
Another area where monitoring helped
the brewery to make progress was the waste
water treatment plant. In 1998, the company
installed modern, computerised equipment
to regulate water flow in the plant, replacing
the local manual system. This investment
alone reduced the brewery's consumption of
potable water by another 48,000 cubic
metres a year.
Technology can take you a long way, but it
is equally important to involve the employees
in the brewery's drive to reduce water usage,
says Zhou Zhi Hua.
As partof Heineken's Aware of Water pro
gramme, the Shanghai brewery held work
shops to raise employee awareness and show
them how to achieve the same results using
less water. One idea for saving water was to
sweep up broken glass with a broom instead
of washing it away with a hose. Another was
to fit nozzles to hoses to reduce their outlet
diameter.
'We trained our people and asked them
to optimise the use of water in their work,'
he explains.
The many improvements have paid off.
The Shanghai brewery now produces 40 per
cent more beer than it did in 1999, but with
one big difference: it is using 40 percent less
water - five litres of water to produce one
litre of beer.
Specific water consumption breweries
performance ofHeineken world-wide, in hi water/hi beer
2006
2005
2004
2003 5 4
target actual
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