Beer With Bread: The Impacts of a Local Circular Integration of Surplus Bread in Craft Brewing

Mestrado em Engenharia do Ambiente / Instituto Superior de Agronomia. Universidade de Lisboa

The urgency of moving away from the linear economy to tackle the environmental pressures of the human activities led to the development of the circular economy theory in the 70’s. When this theory is fully analysed one can find a call to action towards the environmental justice principles that regard the need of reduce, reuse and recycle the material flows of our society while also combining the fight for social justice. Aligned with this, a sustainability study taking a System Thinking approach of a circular flow linking the surplus bread of local businesses to a craft brewery was done, in part of the territory of Marvila and Beato, Lisboa. The system used data from MUSA, a local brewery already doing craft beer with the surplus bread of a Lisbonese bakery, Gleba. The environmental performance evaluated the comparative impacts of the system to be, considering two circular inputs/outputs: bread and beer spent grain (BSG), with the previous or status quo scenarios. For the bread, that replaces the malted barley in the brewing process, this replacement was compared to the previous use of surplus bread from Gleba - porcine feedstock (scenario A). The BSG compared its current use in dairy cattle feed with its landfill (scenario B1) and its use in energy production (scenario B2). The results showed positive impacts in all the 19 environmental categories calculated for both aggregated scenarios (A+B1 and A+B2). When disaggregated, however, the environmental performance of scenario A showed a negative impact in two categories: water use and freshwater ecotoxicity. A description of the social and economic reach of the system was also briefly done, with the statement of potential favourable impacts of the system to the territory because of its alignment towards local economy and creative characteristics of the community that can have ripple effects

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