Conservation of Water Resources

The Sapporo Group conducts appropriate management of the amount of water used and waste water in its water conservation activities. The entire Group will continue its efforts toward protecting precious water resources.

Sapporo Breweries

Along with the 3Rs of water use in the clean/disinfect processes of beer brewing facilities, efforts are being made toward waste water reduction and proper management of waste water quality, based on the laws and regulations of each region.

Sapporo Breweries

Sapporo Breweries is making efforts to reduce the quantity of water used by reusing waste water from manufacturing (water used in manufacturing processes) for environmental equipment and machine cooling procedures. The reuse ratio is approximately 3 to 5%.

Introducing the waste water reuse system

From 2000, the Sapporo Breweries Shizuoka factory has installed a system that collects and reuses waste water discharged into rivers, aiming to efficiently use water resources.
The collected waste water is filtered through a reverse osmosis (RO) membrane* to remove impurities and is reused in areas outside of manufacturing, such as supplementary water for cooling towers and wash water for sludge dehydrators. The waste water collected by this system makes up of approximately 10% of all water used in the Shizuoka factory, resulting in efficient use and conservation of water resources.

*RO (Reverse Osmosis) membrane: A type of membrane filter that only allows water through, and has properties that do not let impurities such as ions and saline pass through.

SAPPORO REAL ESTATE

Recycling waste water and kitchen waste water

Waste water and kitchen waste water discharged from the “Yebisu Garden Place” facilities is processed to become recycled water, with decomposition and removal of organic substances using microorganisms through equipment such as the fluidized bed membrane bioreactor. This recycled water is used to water facility greenery or to flush toilets.

Understanding and eliminating water risk

The Sapporo Group is committed to identifying and eliminating water risks because of the large amount of water used at our production sites and the use of agricultural products produced around the world as raw materials.

Water risk at production sites

To understand the impact of water risk on business continuity, we use the Aqueduct and other data provided by the World Resources Institute (WRI) to survey the Sapporo Group's production sites in Japan and overseas. Aqueduct is a tool published by the World Resources Institute (WRI) that evaluates global water risk based on latitude and longitude. The risk assessment of "Overall water risk" for each site area is as follows.

The Sapporo Group closely monitors areas marked as "Extremely High" as areas with high overall water risk, such as water shortages, floods, and droughts. Only the area of the Long An plant in Vietnam was found to fall under the "High" category. In order to confirm the situation based on these results, we conducted a fact-finding survey of all production bases of the Sapporo Group, including the status of water risk occurrence to date and future possibilities. Some sites have already taken countermeasures, such as preparing manuals for pre- and post-response and continuing communication with local governments and water authorities. Each production site, including the Long An Plant, is continuously striving to use water efficiently. We will continue to periodically monitor production sites for water risks using Aqueduct and other tools. And if production sites with high water risk are identified, we will strengthen our countermeasures according to the situation at those sites.

Water risk in raw material procurement

Water is an indispensable raw material for the alcoholic beverage and food and beverage businesses, and is also necessary for the growth of agricultural products, so we conduct water risk assessments for agricultural production areas. This time, we surveyed the major regional supplier bases for barley and hops, the main raw materials for our core beer business. As a result, we found that none of the sites were classified as "Extremely High" in terms of overall water risk. The investigation of other raw materials is positioned as an issue for the future. We share our sustainability procurement guidelines with our suppliers and strive to ensure safe and secure procurement through communication.

Group-wide water consumption