Life cycle environmental impacts and costs of beer production and consumption in the UK

Global beer consumption is growing steadily and has recently reached 187.37 billion litres per year. The UK ranked 8th in the world, with 4.5 billion litres of beer produced annually. This paper considers life cycle environmental impacts and costs of beer production and consumption in the UK which are currently unknown. The analysis is carried out for two functional units: (i) production and consumption of 1 l of beer at home and (ii) annual production and consumption of beer in the UK. The system boundary is from cradle to grave. Life cycle impacts have been estimated following the guidelines in ISO 14040/44; the methodology for life cycle costing is congruent with the LCA approach. Primary data have been obtained from a beer manufacturer; secondary data are sourced from the CCaLC, Ecoinvent and GaBi databases. GaBi 4.3 has been used for LCA modelling and the environmental impacts have been estimated according to the CML 2001 method. Depending on the type of packaging (glass bottles, aluminium and steel cans), 1 l of beer requires for example 10.3–17.5 MJ of primary energy and 41.2–41.8 l of water, emits 510–842 g of CO2 eq. and has the life cycle costs of 12.72–14.37 pence. Extrapolating the results to the annual consumption of beer in the UK translates to a primary energy demand of over 49,600 TJ (0.56 % of UK primary energy consumption), water consumption of 1.85 bn hl (5.3 % of UK demand), emissions of 2.16 mt CO2 eq. (0.85 % of UK emissions) and the life cycle costs of £553 million (3.2 % of UK beer market value). Production of raw materials is the main hotspot, contributing from 47 to 63 % to the impacts and 67 % to the life cycle costs. The packaging adds 19 to 46 % to the impacts and 13 % to the costs. Beer in steel cans has the lowest impacts for five out of 12 impact categories considered: primary energy demand, depletion of abiotic resources, acidification, marine and freshwater toxicity. Bottled beer is the worst option for nine impact categories, including global warming and primary energy demand, but it has the lowest human toxicity potential. Beer in aluminium cans is the best option for ozone layer depletion and photochemical smog but has the highest human and marine toxicity potentials.