Boon Rawd Breweries is an industry pioneer in operating a highly efficient wastewater treatment facility to minimize any adverse environmental impact on the Chao Phraya River.
For the brewing process, the Singha breweries require every day 10,000 cubic meters of groundwater, the equivalent needed to fill four Olympic-size swimming pools. At the completion of the brewing process, over half of the sourced water ends up wasted, but none of it is released into the community.
Instead, Singha Corporation has developed technologies to treat and recycle the waste water, which is used to replenish the grass and fill the nine lakes of Boon Rawd’s world class golf course in Khon Kaen.
At Boon Rawd’s Khon Kaen brewery in northeastern Thailand, where nearly 11,000 cubic meters of water is processed every day, an innovative filtering system separates the sediment from the waste water. The nutrient-rich sediment is then sent to a belt press that transforms it into raw material for organic fertilizer.
At the recycling plant, the water passes through three more filters to remove any remaining impurities. Afterwards, the treated water is split, some of it used for cleaning the brewery, the rest discharged through a manmade canal system into wetlands full of reeds. As a complex natural filtering system, the reeds break down pollutants and clean the water of bacteria, phosphates and nitrates.
The reeds are later harvested and dried by local villagers, who use them to create their unique handicrafts.
In the course of brewing beer, other waste products occur, and Singha Corporation has devised efficient means to dispose of them. During the filtration process following fermentation, a waste known as Kieselguhr is removed and used as a raw material to make glass beer bottles. Singha Corporation is perhaps the first in the world to use a waste product to manufacture its own bottles.
Yeast is an essential ingredient in the making of beer, and yet a certain percentage of it is filtered out during an early filtration process. Because the used yeast remains nutrient-rich, it is converted into a yellowish powder and given to local dairy farmers to feed their livestock.
Similarly, when wort is separated from the mash in the Lauter Tun, the residual malt grains are later sold as animal feed.