Rhode Island’s Department of Environmental Management works with brewers to develop tailor-made plans to reduce the amount of harmful wastewater coming out of their breweries. On this episode of Possibly we visit Buttonwoods Brewery in Providence to understand what’s going on.

Megan Hall: Welcome to Possibly, where we take on huge problems like the future of our planet and break them down into small questions with unexpected answers. I’m Megan Hall.

Last year, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management got a grant to reduce the environmental impact of the state’s craft beer industry.

That led us at Possibly to say, wait a minute, making craft beer affects the environment? So we sent Samantha Zhang and Nat Hardy from the Possibly team to see what’s going on.

Samantha Zhang: Hi Megan!

Nat Hardy: Hello!

Megan Hall: So, does making craft beer really affect the environment in a major way? Or was this just an excuse to hang out in a brewery?

Samantha Zhang: Not the worst assignment.  But yeah, making beer can create some environmental problems.

Megan Hall: But, craft beer? Isn’t that like tiny businesses?

Nat Hardy: Yes, but they add up. Here in Rhode Island, the craft beverage industry has expanded really quickly over the past decade. Right now, there are 42 breweries in the state.

Megan Hall: So, how do they affect the environment?

Samantha Zhang: First, you need a lot of water to brew beer.

Nat Hardy: And it takes a lot of energy to process the ingredients, which can mean high carbon emissions.

Samantha Zhang: But one of the biggest problems has to do with wastewater:

Nat Hardy: We saw this problem pop up after an incident in Vermont in 2018. More than a million gallons of wastewater, some of it from breweries in the state, was released into Lake Champlain.

Samantha Zhang: The water was so polluted, a lot of beaches had to close.

Megan Hall: Ok, so why do breweries create so much wastewater?

Samantha Zhang: To find out,  we talked with Michele McCaughey who works at the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.

Michele McCaughey: Breweries tend to discharge high strength wastewater, which may have the potential to cause upsets at wastewater treatment facilities.

Megan Hall: What does she mean by “high strength wastewater?” Is it just really concentrated stuff?

Nat Hardy: Yeah that’s part of it, But the water from breweries also contains materials that are especially difficult to process at wastewater treatment facilities.

Samantha Zhang: The water might have a lot of sediment in it.

Nat Hardy: Or lots of greases and oils.

Samantha Zhang: But maybe the biggest concern when it comes to breweries is that there’s something living in the wastewater.

Megan Hall: Like, what?

Morgan Snyder Beer is an organic product. It’s a food product. It’s basically just that you’re making 1000s of loaves of bread at a singular time.

Nat Hardy: That’s Morgan Snyder, the founder of Buttonwoods Brewery, a craft brewery in Providence, Rhode Island. He says to make that liquid bread, you need an organism: yeast!

Morgan Snyder: That is the biggest part of our process. Without it, we can’t make beer.

Samantha Zhang: But when extra water from the beer-making process arrives at wastewater treatment plants with lots of yeast in it, it causes a problem.

Megan Hall: Why?

Nat Hardy: Yeast is an organism that consumes oxygen. And when yeast eats up the oxygen in a waste water treatment plant, it messes with the microbes that the plants use to clean our sewage. It basically takes over the treatment plant.

Samantha Zhang: That’s what happened in Burlington, Vermont in 2018 – They were forced to dump untreated sewage into Lake Champlain.

Megan Hall: Woah. What are breweries doing to deal with this?

Nat Hardy: Well it can be expensive to study and address these issues. And for small breweries, like Morgan’s Buttonwoods Brewery, they don’t have a lot of extra cash to spend.

Samantha Zhang: So the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management used EPA funding to help them reduce their wastewater.

Nat Hardy: The department partners with individual breweries to study their operations and make a list of possible sustainable changes.

Michele McCaughey: Basically, the list it provides like a starting point for breweries to choose their own unique sustainability path based on their operation.

Samantha Zhang: At Buttonwoods Brewery, that meant coming up with some affordable options to prevent organic waste, like yeast, from entering the wastewater stream.

Nat Hardy: But the solutions to reducing the environmental impact of craft brewing looks different at each brewery, both in Rhode Island, and around the country.

Megan Hall: Great! Thanks, Nat and Samantha! And thanks to Charlie Adams for contributing to the reporting on this episode.

That’s it for today. You can find more information, or ask a question about the way your choices affect our planet, at askpossibly.org. You can also subscribe to Possibly wherever you get your podcasts or follow us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Bluesky at  “askpossibly”

Possibly is a co-production of Brown University’s Institute for Environment and Society, Brown’s Climate Solutions Initiative, and the Public’s Radio.

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