Avaliação da sustentabilidade do ciclo de vida em cervejarias artesanais

Abstract

Beer is the most widely consumed alcoholic drink in the world and Brazil is the world's third largest producer. With an increasingly strong beer culture, the number of craft breweries in the country has been growing year after year, reaching more than 1,700 breweries spread across all the states of the federation. This growth in the number of brewing establishments brings with it potential environmental, economic and social impacts. In the quest to mitigate these impacts, Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) is a powerful tool for identifying critical hotspots that occur at different stages of the craft brewing process. The objective of this work was the application of the ASCV methodology to a case study of a craft brewery in the northeast of Brazil. The Systematic Review carried out in this paper did not find any published studies on the subject of LCSA in breweries. The LCSA used in this work uses three methodologies based on the sustainability tripod (environmental, economic and social). Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was identified that the main environmental hotspot was the distribution phase of the craft beer to its points of sale inside and outside the city, accounting for 83% of total emissions. One mitigation proposal put forward was the use of electric vehicles for distribution.This action would bring great environmental benefits, for example, in the Climate Change indicator, the value went from the current 2.46 kg CO2 eq. to 0.65 kg CO2 eq. with the adoption of electric mobility.The Life Cycle Cost Assessment (LCC) analyzed the potential economic impacts of craft beer production. Here, the biggest cost linked to the life cycle of beer was the cost of management, more precisely the taxes paid by craft breweries. The Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) was found that the main critical point was obtaining national malt. Within this process, the barley farming phase was the most impactful. The results of this study show that for each sphere of sustainability there are different hotspots in the processes involved in the beer life cycle. The proposal of measures to mitigate these impacts is particular to each sphere, where the sum of these actions increases the degree of sustainability of the life cycle as a whole.