Alternatively Empowered means making business decisions based on minimizing environmental impact, encouraging the growth of our employee owners, and being a socially responsible contributor to our community. It's rewarding, challenging and educational. It's what makes us New Belgium.

We believe, to be environmental stewards, we need to:

1. Lovingly care for the planet that sustains us.
2. Honor natural resources by closing the loops between waste and input.
3. Minimize the environmental impact of shipping our beer.
4. Reduce our dependence on coal-fired electricity.
5. Protect our precious Rocky Mountain water resources.
6. Focus our efforts on conservation and efficiency.
7. Support innovative technology.
8. Model joyful environmentalism through our commitment to relationships, continuous improvement, and the camaraderie and cheer of beer

Our Alternatively Empowered efforts:

While there are many ways to be stewards of the earth, each company must determine which strengths they have to leverage. Here are some of ours:

1. Increased efficiencies in the brewing process

Our brew kettle, Steinecker's Merlin, was the second of its kind installed in the U.S. and is considered more efficient than standard brew kettles because it heats thin sheets of wort rather than the whole kettle at once.

During wort boil, the steam exits the kettle through a stack and into a heat exchanger which continually extracts heat from the steam vapor and holds it in our energy storage tank. During the next batch, the stored heat helps the wort to boil very quickly, allowing us to use very little primary energy.

2. Utilized green design throughout our building.

• Lighting. We take full advantage of the more than 360 days of sunshine in Fort Collins by using UV blocking windows, sun-tubes, and light shelves.
• HVAC. Using evaporative coolers, we can condition our 55,000 square foot packaging hall with no compressors, using much less energy.
• Materials. In our new packaging hall, the interior wood is beetle kill pine. Summit County, CO, anticipates that mountain pine beetles will kill 98% of their lodgepole pines. So, we’re giving these fallen trees another life.

3. Implemented a process for treating our wastewater:
The Clean Water Act of 1973 requires business to clean their water to domestic treatment standards before discharging, but we go above and beyond to reduce the load on our municipal plant. And we get two valuable by-products from this treatment—methane and nutrient-rich sludge.

4. On-site energy production
The methane produced by process water treatment is used to fuel a combined heat and power engine—or co-gen—which creates electricity and heat for the brewery. The co-gen allows us to offset those critical—and expensive—peak loads by creating electricity on-site from a renewable source—our process wastewater. When the co-gen is running full-time, it can supply 15% of our electrical needs.

5. Wind-powered electricity since 1999
In 1999, New Belgium became the largest private consumer of wind-power electricity at that time and the first wind-powered brewery. In 1998, when we were researching ways to lower our environmental impact, Fort Collins was launching the first city-sponsored wind program in Colorado. We made a 10-year commitment to buy all of our electricity through the program, which allowed them to install an additional turbine, in Medicine Bow, WY. Since the wind premium increased our total cost per kilowatt-hour by 57%, it impacted employee’s profit sharing pool. So, we asked employees: wind-power or not? They unanimously voted for clean energy, and the decision is a fabled moment in New Belgium history.

6. Employ a High Involvement Culture
An environment in which the full power of everyone’s hearts and minds are brought to bear on creating positive change. HIC is a 3-legged stool which stands on opening the books, employee ownership, and participative decision-making.

7. Sustainable Eventing

We try to minimize the environmental impact of our events at every turn. Our philanthropic bike festival, Tour de Fat, celebrates bicycling as a viable form of alternative transport. A solar-powered stage provides sound for the day, beer is served in compostable cups and our overall waste stream diversion rate is better than 85%.

8. Actionable Advocacy

• We’re members of 1% For the Planet, which means that, through donations and fund-raisers, 1% of our revenue goes to environmental non-profits.
• Team Wonderbike, our bicycle commuter advocacy program, has more than 10,000 members who have pledged to offset more than eight million car miles by riding their bikes more over the next twelve months.
• Public speaking/education: Because we make and sell beer, people are interested in our story. We’ve been very successful while being values-driven, and we strive to be a business role model.
• To encourage sustainable transportation, every employee gets a custom cruiser bike after one-year of employment.

9. Constant benchmarking
Without data, how can you measure progress? Every company needs to figure out how to track non-financial results, to be sure that they’re not just giving lip-service to environmental goals. Our Life-cycle Accessment

10. Partnering to support innovative technology

The company Oberon has installed a small treatment plant next to our own that will use our process wastewater to harvest sludge to create a high protein fish food for aqua-farms. If successful, we can learn how to turn our waste stream (that currently becomes an amendment to compost) into an income stream and a source of global nutrition.

Above is what we're currently doing. Below are the lofty goals we've set as we continue to learn and grow:

• To reduce our carbon footprint by 25%*
• To reduce our water usage by 10%
• To increase our landfill diversion rate from 89.5% to 95% (note: brewing by-products like spent grain and yeast are NOT included in these figures. If they were included, it would be 99%).

*As methods of carbon accounting are currently evolving, it is possible that these goals will be amended in the future.

What we'll be working on:

1. A database to track the source and environmental attributes of all of our ingredients and packaging
2. More on-site energy generation with solar photovoltaic and additional co-gen's
3. A no-idling policy at our docks Challenging our employees to measure and reduce their carbon footprint
4. Partnering with local advocates to maintain a healthy watershed along the Poudre River
5. And, with partial financing from the Department of Energy, another partnering effort with the City of Fort Collins, CSU, and others to demonstrate 30% peak load reduction on substation feeders by:

• Installing a solar photovoltaic array
• Researching new ways to make methane from by-products
• Adding another co-gen and methane balloon

Links:

Colorado Climate Project
Governor Ritter’s Colorado Climate Action Plan
Fort Collins Climate Task Force

So, what can you do? A lot! Here are just a few ideas to Alternatively Empower your life:

1. Have patience

Remember when we were taught that patience is a virtue? Convenience can be a crutch to justify less-than-thoughtful, need-displacing, impulse shopping. The next time you go to buy something, stop and think about what it will bring to you and your community as a whole. Ask yourself: Can I get this used? Can I barter for it? Where was it made? Was it made by someone treated with the dignity they deserve? Patience and mind-full living will greatly enrich your life and reduce chaotic clutter.

2. Hang your clothes out to dry

The clothing-dryer is the 2nd-most energy consumptive household appliance after the refrigerator and arguably the most frivolous (after the vibrating belt exercise machine). Even if you don’t have space for an outdoor clothesline there are indoor racks that are compact and work like a charm.

3. Love your neighbor

Not just the Jones’ down the street but also the flowers, the foxes, the birds, the mountains, and the rivers. All things are inexplicably connected, and if we can begin to treat our wider neighbors with the respect that we strive to treat other humans, the results will be beautiful. Live with an astute awareness of your actions and their affects on the whole.

4. Put on a sweater

When the temperatures drop, rather than throwing another log on the fire (or coal in the power plant) throw on a sweater, put on some soft booties, and sip a steamy hot drink. It’ll make you feel all warm and fuzzy.

5. Bike, walk, bus, or just stay home and relax

Try to wean yourself from America’s addiction to the automobile. Set goals, like “this year I will only drive my car once a week.” It’s fun! And there are lots of people doing it. Join them at Team Wonderbike!

6. Support local agriculture

Shop at the Farmers Market, join a C.S.A (Community Supported Agriculture) Farm, or grow a garden. Eating is a divine act—who created your meal?

7. Drink tap water

Shipping bottled water around the world in plastic bottles burns a heap of fuel, pollutes our air, and puts more plastic into an increasingly plastic-sheathed world. Fort Collins has some of the best tap water in the world, but if tap water is not up to your standards, there are very high quality filters available at much more affordable prices than the cost of purchasing bottled water.

8. Use your own shopping bag

Next time you’re asked, “Paper or plastic?” say, “Neither, I have my own bags.”

9. Unplug

Turn off your computer when you are not using it. Unplug your chargers. Most cell-phone chargers continue to draw electricity even when the phone isn’t plugged into it. If your cell-phone charger averages five watts and is plugged in all the time, that means a total of more than 40 kilowatt-hours every year, or about 93 pounds of CO2. The same problem applies to your other electronic equipment—your laptop, iPod, digital camera, television, and BlackBerry. Unplug everything when not in use.

10. Unplug, really…

Take regular hiatuses from the cyber world that has crept into nearly all aspects of modern American life. Schedule them if you must, but really unplug for a while. Leave your iPod at home, don’t bring your cell phone every time you leave the house, keep your computer off for the entire weekend, don’t get in your car, and refrain from using any power at all for even a ½ day. Your body, heart, and mind will thank you.