<
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/03/21/scotland-making-whiskey-with-energy-wind-wood-chips-tides/>
"LOCHALINE, Scotland — A tippler might not know it from the pretty
advertisements, which hype the mountain streams and woolly highlands, but
making Scotch whisky can be a dirty business — an energy-intensive,
carbon-spewing, peat-burning industry, mostly owned by multinational
conglomerates that ship their $50-plus bottles to swells around the world.
On the picture-perfect western isles of Scotland famous for their whiskies —
Islay, Skye, Jura, Arran — the whitewashed distilleries are often the largest
sources of greenhouse gas emissions in their bucolic regions, ahead of the
diesel ferries and pastures of belching sheep.
But something head-turning is happening.
The owners of the 140 distilleries in Scotland have pledged, voluntarily, to
transform the industry and make their operations “net-zero” in carbon emissions
by 2040, a decade earlier than Britain as a whole and five years earlier than
Scotland has promised.
The Scotch Whisky Association wants consumers to imagine a future when the
old-time distilleries turn away from fossil fuels and toward energy generated
by wind and wood chips, by ocean tides and 21st-century green hydrogen.
They see a day when whisky makers will more wisely husband Scotland’s water and
better recycle their waste, and deploy the dregs — the byproducts like draff
and pot ale — into a virtuous “circular economy” of fertilizer, animal feed and
biofuel.
Soon, they hope, those road-hogging buses that trundle tourists on narrow roads
around lochs on whisky-tasting tours will run on batteries topped up at the
30,000 new charging stations Scotland has promised by 2030."
Via
The Fixer May 31, 2023:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/scotland-whiskey-distilleries-carbon-neutral/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
