Life Cycle Assessment Of Beer And Cleaner Production Of Beer Brewing Industry

The beer brewing industry takes an important part in the food production industry in our country. In2012, China’s beer production reached47.8billion tons, with the growth rate of9.87%. Thus, China has kept as the leader in beer production around the world for11consecutive years. Due to manufacturing technique, large amount of COD and NH4-N are discharged into the environment. On the other hand, excessive non-renewable energy and resources are consumed during the brewing processes. Cleaner production can help the beer enterprises to find the high pollution and high energy-consumption stage. Through the implementation of the cleaner production scheme, the beer enterprises could achieve the production objective-"Energy conservation, Emission reduction, Pollution reduction and Efficiency enhancement". In the traditional study, cleaner production scheme was carried out by the weighted ranking method. Limitations exist in the processes of weight factors’ distribution and alternative auditing stage identification, which may result in deviation in the result. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method was used to analyze the environmental impact in the life cycle process of beer production. Major pollution stages and major environmental impact types were diagnosed according to the analysis result, which can direct the enterprises to form the cleaner production scheme.The main content of this paper is as follows:(1) Raw material planting stage and bottle filling stage were set as the start and end point respectively. System boundary of beer production and LCA model were set up, and input and output inventory of beer production was built as followed. Life cycle assessment (LCA) of beer production was calculated using Gabi5.0software. Potential environmental impact result can be showed with the CML2001Dec07model.(2) Life cycle assessment result can be calculated through characterization, normalization, and weighting. Global Warming Potential (GWP), Acidification Potential (AP), Eutrophication Potential (EP), Abiotic Depletion Potential (ADP), Human Toxicity Potential (HTP) and Photochemical Ozone Creation Potential (POCP) were analyzed as the environmental impact factors in the life cycle of beer production. The results indicate that the GWP is the major environmental impact factor in the beer production. Regarding the extent of environmental impacts, these parameters can be sorted as:GWP, EP, AP, HTP, POCP and ADP. The stages can be sorted as bottle filling stage, raw material planting stage, sugaring stage, boiling stage, fermentation stage, crushing stage, malting stage and two filtration stages.(3) According to the LCA result, major pollution stages and environmental impact types were confirmed. In this paper, technical improvement was implemented in bottle filling stage, sugaring stage and boiling stage; on the other hand, technical improvement was implemented to reduce the GWP, EP and AP. Finally,4high-cost CP projects and8low-cost CP projects were carried out.(4) Effects of cleaner production can be indicated by a quantitative analysis of the inventory before and after project implementation. The results indicate that energy consumption, water consumption, beer loss and waste water amount have been reduced by34.5kg,3.11t,0.1%and1.4t, respectively. GWP, AP and EP have been reduced by19.14%,17.35%and14.26%, respectively. It shows both environmental and economic benefits definitely by cleaner production.