Danish Prime Minister inaugurates ground-breaking Carlsberg water treatment plant

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen inaugurated on May 6, Carlsberg’s new water treatment plant at the company’s large brewery in Fredericia, Denmark. The PM said it was ‘probably the most water efficient brewery the world’.

NIRAS has played a key role as project manager throughout the whole process.

“We are immensely proud to be able to unveil the world’s most water efficient brewing facility. Water is a basic ingredient in all our products, so water resource management is a high priority. Our water to beer ratio has always been low. Now we are taking it a step further. By recycling process water in our production, we are virtually eliminating water waste,” says Philip Hodges, EVP Integrated Supply Chain, Carlsberg Group.

With the new water treatment plant the global brewery group is setting new standards for sustainability within the brewing sector. Carlsberg’s brewery in Fredericia will thus be able to recycle 90% of its process water and thereby reduce the water usage from 2,9 hectolitres (hl) water per hl of beer to just 1,4 hl water per hl of beverage.

Pilot project for Carlsberg on a global scale

Since water is essential to the sustainability of the societies where the brewery group operates, and since clean water is a priority in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Carlsberg has set a goal of eliminating water waste by 2030. This target forms part of the group’s sustainability programme ‘Together Towards Zero’ and its ZERO Water waste strategy.

"We have a goal of zero water waste globally in 2030. As a global company, we have a responsibility to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and as a brewery, we have a special responsibility to reduce water waste in our global production. The new water recycling plant in Fredericia will generate important learnings that can be implemented across our breweries in the rest of the world,” says Carlsberg Group CEO, Cees ’t Hart.

The Fredericia Brewery has already achieved Carlsberg’s 2030 target of eliminating water waste. The aim is to reduce the overall water use globally across the Carlsberg Group from 3,4 to 1,7 hl of water per hectolitre of finished beverage.  

New innovative form of Total Water Management

“With Total Water Management we have introduced a new innovative and structured way of evaluating and improving the water efficiency of a company. This includes the possibility of re-utilising water in a safe manner within the brewing industry, where the quality of the recycled water must be very high to meet the high food safety standards. As part of the project we have evaluated and assembled a series of relatively new technologies that combined will ensure that the water efficiency is improved considerably,” says Søren Nøhr Bak, who as expertise director in NIRAS was project manager on the Carlsberg’s water recycling project.

NIRAS’s experts have been involved in all phases of the project and they helped Carlsberg develop a complete business case for the water recycling plant. Furthermore, they also assisted with the approvals from the Danish food and environmental authorities.

Finally, NIRAS was also in charge of the project management of the whole project from beginning to end.

Cooperation across sectors in Denmark creates sustainable solution

”At NIRAS, we are very proud to have contributed to this groundbreaking project. Carlsberg has an extremely high standard for sustainable transition within beer and beverage sector, including both water usage, energy, work environment, and packaging. We hope that we will be able to assist Carlsberg on the rest of this journey,” says Søren Nøhr Bak.

He emphasizes that the water recycling plant is also a result of the collaboration in the Danish partnership for Resource and water efficient Industrial food Production (DRIP).

“The new water recycling plant of Carlsberg is also the story of how the food authorities, the universities and the food and beverage industry in Denmark for years have cooperated in order to create new technologies and solutions that benefit both the industry and society at large,” he says.