Lightning Labels Blog

Posted by Peter Renton on February 11th, 2009

One of my favorite beers is a local Colorado beer called Fat Tire. It is made by New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins and they are well known as a company with a strong environmental conviction. So, they decided to measure the exact impact that their beer has on the environment by measuring the carbon footprint of a six pack of Fat Tire beer.

Last year they hired the Climate Conservancy to create this very comprehensive report that goes into great detail on the amount of greenhouse gases emitted during the lifecycle of a six pack of Fat Tire beer. Of most interest to me was the impact of the paper labels. The impact of the paper material was 9.2g of CO₂ and the adhesive was 7.6g of CO₂, which includes the shipping of the beer labels to the bottling plant. So, a total impact of 16.8g of CO₂ for each six pack of Fat Tire produced.

The report is 37 pages long and it most likely is the most comprehensive study done by any brewery on the environmental impact of beer. The total average CO₂ emission to produce a six pack of Fat Tire and transport it to its destination in a liquor store is 3,189g. It is good to know the label only contributes around 0.5% of the total.

I expect to see more companies doing these kinds of studies in the future and eventually this information will make its way on to product labels. In case you are wondering, New Belgium produces a Sustainability report that details how it tries to mitigate the large amounts of CO₂ that is emitted as part of its beer production process.

Photo by Shiokuma.

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This entry was posted February 11th, 2009 by Peter Renton and is filed under Beer Labels, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “The Carbon Footprint of Fat Tire Beer”

1. Labelman says:

   March 6, 2009 at 10:33 pm

   Steve,

   Did the (cost/effort undertaken)of the study itself have a larger carbon footprint then the labels?

   I get the point, but it sound silly.

   Love your insight!!
2. Extra Beer says:

   June 16, 2009 at 10:25 pm

   It's actually sillier than you imagine. The smartest people in the room are complete dolts and utter fools. China and India will produce more carbon then all the Western nations combined. What the Green Weenies are doing with their carbon foot print amounts to public auto-eroticism. all sound and fury signifying nothing.
3. tyre changers says:

   August 19, 2009 at 3:40 am

   What i love about this beer is the goodness behind ingredients.Belgian beers use a far broader palette of ingredients like fruits, spices,esoteric yeast strains.