Save the planet (by drinking beer)!
Tuesday, 13 October 2009 09:56 | 
Written by Jeremy Burgess
In late 2008 I did a little informal consultancy after a conversation with Julian Feasby, Head of Environmental Performance for the UK's Environment Agency. We were trying to work out how we could help the nation to reduce their energy consumption in small and easy steps. We came up with the guiding premise:
We can save the planet by drinking beer!
With a little research and the help of a spreadsheet we had our answer. It is possible to drink responsibly and save the planet. The resulting figures ended up as the official email footer at The Agency for a month leading up to Christmas as we showed how the nation could save around 713 tonnes of coal with almost no effort at all.
Why should you care?
As I was walking to work this morning with cold fingers and freezing ears I was reminded of that calculation and thought it was worth sharing again. Men everywhere should use this irrefutable argument to protect their drinking rights. Obviously there are a great many women who consume alcohol, but few will be sad enough to try and justify themselves.
Why keep your beer in the fridge when it's cold outside? If it's cold outside, why not just leave your beer outside the back door?
How does it work?
The basic premise of our argument is that it's wasteful to use an energy consuming fridge to cool your drinks and then keep them cool when there is a free, natural resource to help you do the same... the great outdoors. In the Microsoft Excel beer cooling calculator. We have made a number of assumptions but ALL of them err on the side of caution which means that the environmental savings are greater than those we calculate. We have also used only the figures for beer and cider consumption, ignoring the impact of following this advice with wine, champagne and any other chilled drinks. The benefits could be huge!
Our top line figures would suggest:
- Beer / lager / cider consumption at home: 23.5 litres per capita per year
- Beer / lager / cider consumption during December: 2.76 litres per capita (we KNOW this is aiming low)
- Energy required to cool the nations drinks in December: 1.9 Megawatt hours
What's the impact?
This means you could turn off the Drax power station for 0.48 hours and save an amazing 713 tonnes of coal (that's about half and Olympic swimming pool by volume)... just by putting your beer outside.
Enjoy!
Beer drinkers' energy saving calculator by Jeremy Burgess, GoldFigure Ltd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
 Save_energy_by_drinking.xls | 25 Kb | 10/13/2009 |
Last Updated (Tuesday, 13 October 2009 09:56)
