Business
Mill Street Brewery – Setting The Bar For Energy Efficiency
Mill Street Brewery, born out of the Toronto Distillery District, their story begins with the emergence of a small red brick brewery back in 2002. Over the last two decades, one thing has consistently taken precedence over their process. Care and consideration for their environmental footprint on the commercial and local level.
The IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), in association with the National Retail Federation, conducted a research study of 18,980 consumers in 28 countries. Some of this data reported 57% of consumers would pivot their spending habits for more environmentally friendly brands. In line with the efforts by the Mill Street Brewery team, the study also reports 77% of consumers consider sustainability and environmentally responsible brands important when asked about their spending habits.
Not often do we deep dive into what our favourite brands are proactively doing to increase their green initiatives, whether it be energy efficiency, consumption, recycling or waste management. Fortunate to have the opportunity to speak with Kaitlin Vandenbosch, Brewmaster for Mill Street Brewery and Bennie Dingemanse, Head Brewer at the Mill Street Brewery Calgary Brewpub to discuss their efforts as an organization and also what it means to their team as they continue to improve their environmentally friendly initiatives.
An interesting story to tell behind this brand, continuing to produce their Original Organic Lager since the day their doors opened. Continuously seeking new ways as a team to reduce their energy consumption and environmental footprint. Serving local areas in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, Ottawa and St. Johns, Mill Street is the largest producer of certified organic beer in Canada. The best part is that their certified organic pale barley malt is Canadian grown & processed. The barley they use is grown in Saskatoon and Alberta, then malted in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Kaitlin offers some additional insight into sourcing local as an organization.
“It used to be very difficult to find raw organic materials back in 2002, over the years we have worked very closely with the barley malt industry in North America and Canada Malting. Since 2007, working with these organizations, we were able to transition all of our organic malts to be grown in Canada on the prairies and they certified their facility in Thunder Bay to process that malt for us. Around 15-20 Canadian farmers grow the grains that are used in our organic beers.”
Being one of the largest breweries in Canada, the importance of having educated professionals working as a team to implement set targets to work towards is a great way to continuously improve and reduce their emissions. Kaitlin mentions exceeding some of the targets they set for 2019.
“For 2019, we had targets set a for 10% energy and water reduction and a 4% increase in waste divergence. We exceeded all of those targets. Working with our various operations and maintenance teams, engineers, the city and the companies that pick up our waste. We have had a 12.5% reduction in energy usage, a 17% decrease in water consumption, and a 12.5% increase in divergence of waste. It is something that we are always looking at both in our production facility and our brewpubs.”
Mill Street has one Brewpub location in Calgary managed by Head Brewer, Bennie Dingemanse. Located on 17th Avenue SW, serving Mill Street house-brewed products and great food in the most vibrant part of the city. The green initiatives continue to be a key driver for the Brewpub team, Bennie offers his thoughts on working towards a cleaner future in his Calgary location.
“We divert our waste stream from our restaurant with our waste collection service providers. After collecting data from just our first quarter, we saved 2.2 barrels of oil, we saved about 14 trees, close to 4,000Kw/h of energy and 22,000 liters of water just by diverting our waste and having it properly disposed of. Another thing we do on the Brewpub level is looking at new methods when cleaning our tanks, where we analyze our water usage and work towards minimizing our wastewater while achieving the same result.”
Not only that, but Bennie and his team have proactively found ways to have their waste material exported so that it can be repurposed for commercial use by local merchants. One example is a partnership with coRISE, who actively utilize spent grain from the Calgary Brewpub for baked goods to sell in the local community. Bennie and his team have also been extracting sugar from spent material, combining it with food waste from the restaurant to be turned into compost.
As we continue to navigate this mid-to-post pandemic; breweries, restaurants and bars alike have adopted eCommerce to serve their customers. Mill Street has a variety of options to continue offering its house-brewed products and menu. Delivery is available on UberEats, SkipTheDishes, Doordash and from their Calgary website. As an added benefit, Bennie mentions that they recently updated their delivery radius to service areas outside of the downtown core.
Visiting The Mill Street Calgary Brewpub
To stay updated, Bennie recommends following his location on social media for any future updates on guidelines or new product releases. On the Brewpub level, following all Alberta Health Services recommendations in regards to capacity and sanitization. They have implemented new cleaning policies, hand sanitizer as you enter and staff are washing their hands regularly. Recently partnering with a local startup called LivCity that has developed an app for contactless ordering from your table using your smartphone, mitigating interactions between customers and staff in the efforts of social distancing.
If you would like to learn more about the forward-thinking initiatives being implemented by the Mill Street Brewery team, or to browse their wide array of products available, visit their main website here, Calgary Brewpub website or follow them on their social media accounts below.
Mill Street Calgary Brewpub Facebook
For more stories, visit Todayville Calgary
From the Fraser Institute
This year’s COP wants to fast-track the world’s transition to “clean” energy, help vulnerable communities adapt to climate change, work on “mobilizing inclusivity” (whatever that means) and “delivering on climate finance,” which is shorthand for having wealthier developed countries such as Canada transfer massive amounts of wealth to developing countries.
Every year, the United Nations convenes a Conferences of Parties to set the world’s agenda to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It’s the biggest event of the year for the climate industry. This year’s conference (COP29), which ends on Sunday, drew an army of government officials, NGOs, celebrities and journalists (many flying on GHG-emitting jet aircraft) to Baku, Azerbaijan.
The COP follows a similar narrative every year. It opens with a set of ambitious goals for climate policies, followed by days of negotiating as countries jockey to carve out agreements that most favour their goals. In the last two days, they invariably reach a sticking point when it appears the countries might fail to reach agreement. But they burn some midnight oil, some charismatic actors intervene (in the past, this included people such as Al Gore), and with great drama, an agreement is struck in time for the most important event of the year, flying off to their protracted winter holidays.
This year’s COP wants to fast-track the world’s transition to “clean” energy, help vulnerable communities adapt to climate change, work on “mobilizing inclusivity” (whatever that means) and “delivering on climate finance,” which is shorthand for having wealthier developed countries such as Canada transfer massive amounts of wealth to developing countries.
Some of these agenda items are actually improvements over previous COPs. For example, they’re actually talking about “climate adaptation”—the unwanted stepchild of climate policies—more this year. But as usual, money remains a number one priority. As reported in the Associated Press, “negotiators are working on a new amount of cash for developing nations to transition to clean energy, adapt to climate change and deal with weather disasters. It’ll replace the current goal of $100 billion (USD) annually—a goal set in 2009.” Moreover, “experts” claim the world needs between $1 trillion and $1.3 trillion (yes, trillion) in “climate finance” annually. Not to be outdone, according to an article in the Euro News, other experts want $9 trillion per year by 2030. Clearly, the global edifice that is climate change activism is all about the money.
Reportedly, COP29 is in its final section of the meta-narrative, with much shouting over getting to a final agreement. One headline in Voice of America reads “Slow progress on climate finance fuels anger as COP29 winds down.” And Argus News says “climate finance talks to halt, parties fail to cut options.” We only await the flying in of this year’s crop of climate megafauna to seal the deal.
This year’s conference in Baku shows more clearly than ever before that the real goal of the global climate cognoscenti is a giant wealth transfer from developed to developing countries. Previous climate conferences, whatever their faults, focused more on setting emission reduction targets and timelines and less about how the UN can extract more money from developed countries. The final conflict of COP29 isn’t about advancing clean energy targets or helping vulnerable countries adapt to climate change technologically, it’s all about show me the money.
Author:
From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Average compensation for a federal bureaucrat is $125,300. Cutting back the bureaucracy to population growth would save taxpayers $9 billion every year
Dumb government spending doesn’t stop at the 49th parallel.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced the creation of a Department of Government Efficiency, with a mandate to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”
Those marching orders sure would sound good in a prime minister’s mandate letter to a finance minister. And here’s the blueprint they should follow.
Begin with crazy research Canadian taxpayers are forced to subsidize.
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council spends $1 billion a year supporting “research and research training in the social sciences and humanities.”
Here’s a little taste of the reports it funds with your tax dollars:
- Gender Politics in Peruvian Rock Music ($20,000)
- Cart-ography: tracking the birth, life and death of an urban grocery cart, from work product to work tool ($105,000)
- My Paw in Yours: Dead Pets and Transcendence of Species Divides in Experimental Art-Making Practice ($17,500)
- Playing for Pleasure: The Affective Experience of Sexual and Erotic Video Games ($50,000)
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Parks Canada put Mr. Magoo in charge of its hunting operations. It spent four years and $10,000 capturing a single bullfrog and dropped $800,000 hunting 84 deer on a B.C. Island. How can a simple hunt cost $10,000 per deer?
Well, hunting gets more expensive when instead of your grandpa’s old rifle, you use prohibited semi-automatic weapons, instead of a box of shells, you get a crate of ammo, and instead of your buddy’s old pickup, you rent a helicopter for $67,000.
Or how about the $8-million barn at Rideau Hall. Or $12,500 live senior citizen sex story shows. Or the $8,800 sex toy show in Germany. Or the millions wasted producing government podcasts no one listens to.
Then there’s government officials living high on the hog.
Governor General Mary Simon spent $71,000 on limo services in Iceland. Bureaucrats spend $76,000 a month renting art. Global Affairs Canada spends $51,000 on booze a month.
Now, the big stuff.
The size and cost of the government is out of control. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hired 108,000 new bureaucrats. That’s a 42 per cent increase in less than a decade.
Had the bureaucracy only increased with population growth, there would be 72,491 fewer bureaucrats today.
Average compensation for a federal bureaucrat is $125,300. Cutting back the bureaucracy to population growth would save taxpayers $9 billion every year.
It’s time to stop rewarding failure with bonuses.
The feds dished out $1.5 billion in bonuses since 2015.
And the bonuses flow despite federal departments only managing to hit half of their performance targets once in the past five years.
Government executives overseeing ArriveSCAM took $340,000 in bonuses.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation rubberstamped $102 million in bonuses amid the worst housing crisis in Canadian history.
The Bank of Canada printed $20 million in bonus cheques in 2022, as inflation reached a 40-year high.
The CBC dished out $132 million in bonuses since 2015.
The next thing on the chopping block? Corporate welfare.
Trudeau put taxpayers on the hook for $30 billion in subsidies to multinational corporations like Honda,Volkswagen, Stellantis and Northvolt.
Federal corporate subsidies totalled $11.2 billion in 2022 alone.
Shutting down the federal government’s seven regional development agencies would save taxpayers an estimated $1.5 billion annually.
True efficiency would also mean eliminating failing government operations altogether. The feds should sell any Crown corporation that can, or should, be left to the private sector.
Here are a few examples.
The CBC, which takes more than $1 billion from taxpayers annually.
Canada Post, which lost $1.2 billion in the last two years and forecasts “larger, unsustainable losses in future years.”
VIA Rail, took $1.8 billion in taxpayer cash during the past five years just to cover operating losses.
The bad news for taxpayers is we pay too much tax because the government wastes too money. The list of wasteful spending in this article is far from exhaustive.
Other examples include the multi-billion dollar gun confiscation that police officers say won’t work, the $25-billion equalization scheme and taxpayer-funded media bailouts, among others.
The good news is a champion of taxpayers could make massive cuts and barely anyone outside the Ottawa bubble would notice.
This is the blueprint to slash Ottawa’s wasteful, bloated bureaucracy. All we need now is a prime minister with the guts to pick up the scissors.
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