One Brew = One Tree
When we first sat down to create Drop Project, what we soon realised how essential our beliefs are to create a sustainable business. It sounds basic, and almost obvious in a modern world, but not as straight forward in what is essentially a production and distribution business.
We all share a love for the environment and enjoying it through our passions. In recent times I believe even more people have come to that realisation when it was taken away almost instantly.
Currently as “Gipsy” Brewers it is extremely hard to control all of production and distribution to nullify the associated negative impacts. Fortunately, we use a site that has a large solar farm present, so can generate, and contribute back electricity taken from the grid in production. However, this will not be forever (we hope).
There are aspects that we are aware of that are not so good, for instance our use of Key Kegs a packing format we are minimising where possible. Although recyclable, they often are not. With the best intentions we intend to switch to re-usable kegs and eventually integrate our own keg fleet. There are of course other wasteful aspects in the production process, such as the intensive use of water.
Some byproducts can be integrated back into the environment. Our spent grain is used as animal feed, and spent hops and yeast is composted and spread as fertiliser locally on our current brewery site location. We also only can small pack, and aluminium is forever recyclable, It's lightweight nature greatly reduces diesel miles burning less fossil fuels per KG. Our packaging and cardboard is also recyclable.
All these things are great but not close to enough. We are still unfortunately strapped to the use of fossil fuels in the supply of our mains electricity and the burning of natural gas in our boilers. We cannot recycle this Co2 nor can we reduce it significantly in the current age. We can however offset this.
Our first initiative to dampen the carbon footprint is our Tree Planting Initiative. Trees supply life giving oxygen and absorb Co2 from our atmosphere. They also provide rapidly disappearing habitat for our native fauna and sadly this eco system is fading fast!
For every brew produced we pledge to plant one tree!
This as a small but positive step towards our goal of not being carbon neutral, but carbon negative. We have so far donated 20 trees on the day we cast our 20th brew into tank. We have done this with the help of the great people at The Tree Council, a charity pledged not only to plant trees but has an excellent education program and initiatives to support action.
This is a relatively easy step for us, a very small young business with limited resources, but it is a step none the less. We hope to take much larger and effective ones in the future and develop this initiative to bring strong positive impacts to the environment.
Love from the Team.
