ASU professor finds craft brewers eager for guidance on sustainability - ASU Now

August 5, 2021

Survey reveals lack of planning, tracking among small brewers

The craft brew industry has boomed over the past few years, and new research by an Arizona State University professor shows that while the brewers would like to use sustainable practices, many don’t think that consumers would be willing to pay a lot extra to support those efforts.

“Brewing is quite resource-intensive, and the number of craft brewers has hugely increased. We had 1,500 12 years ago and now it’s over 7,000,” said Carola Grebitus, an associate professor of food industry management in the Morrison School of Agribusiness at Arizona State University’s Polytechnic campus.

“Brewing is very water-intensive, and we were thinking about what that might mean,” said Grebitus, who also is a senior sustainability scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at ASU. Her paper, "Sustainable development in the craft brewing industry," was published recently in the journal Business Strategy and the Environment.

Her co-author in the study was Alicia Rosburg, associate professor of economics and Provost's Fellow for Sustainability at the University of Northern Iowa. That university offers the Iowa Green Brewery Certification, which provides technical assistance and guidance on environmental issues to small-scale brewers.

“So we are both in sustainability, and we wanted to know about this business that is still relatively young,” Grebitus said.

“The National Brewers Association has a lot of material on sustainability available to their members, so we wanted to know what they’re doing, and if they are doing something, in terms of recycling or energy use, are they tracking it?”

The two created a survey and then administered it to 29 craft breweries in Iowa, asking questions about sustainability practices and the brewers' perceptions of whether consumers would pay extra for those efforts. While the sample size of this study was small, Grebitus said that she and Rosburg are seeking a grant to expand the survey to many more craft brewers.

One of the biggest takeaways from the results is that even when the brewers are using sustainable practices, they’re not always tracking the results. While 80% track energy and water use, fewer than two-thirds kept track of recycling and wastewater, and about a third tracked trash headed to the landfill.

Among the results:

The respondents were environmentally conscious — more than 70% were either very or extremely concerned about environmental issues, and more than 75% usually or always purchase environmentally friendly products whenever they can.
But less than half of the breweries conduct an “annual assessment (internal or external) to evaluate operating procedures and identify opportunities for improving environmental practices.” A similar percentage had a “policy/mission statement that supports a commitment to environmental stewardship.”
Energy and wastewater were areas that breweries were least likely to have an environmental plan, with only around 10% of the respondents actively planning each of these areas.

Grebitus said that many of the brewers were arranging to have farmers pick up their “mash,” the grain byproduct left over from the beer-making process, which can feed livestock.

“But they’re not tracking that much, and we see room for improvement because if you don’t track something, you don’t know what’s happening,” she said.

The survey also found that 90% of the brewers believe that consumers will pay a small premium to support a brewer that achieved a certain sustainability level, about 1% to 5% more, but likely not more than that.

The researchers speculated that one reason that brewers aren’t prioritizing planning and tracking of sustainability measures is simple: They’re too busy.

Grebitus teaches the “Business of Beer” class at the Polytechnic campus, along with Tim Richards, who holds the Marvin and June Morrison Chair in agribusiness. The course teaches business principles focusing on different aspects of the beer industry, and brings in many guest speakers.

“Every single brewer that comes in is incredibly busy,” she said. “They wear so many hats.

“They might have to go in in the middle of the night because the brewing process is done and otherwise, the beer will go bad.”

The message is that startups should consider a sustainability plan from the beginning.

“If you start with certain things at the beginning — set up the mash transport, pay attention to water usage, check for energy leaks in your brewery — that can do a lot for you,” she said.

Grebitus believes that brewers are craving guidance on this issue.

“I have letters from 15 or 20 different brewers, and they would be so invested if we got the funding to bring this survey to a national scale,” she said.

“It’s an amazing industry with such hard-working, compassionate people, and it’s refreshing because it’s not just about the profit.

“They care about their product and are constantly trying to improve.”

Top image courtesy Pixabay.

August 5, 2021

Elizabeth Larson was 21 when she first traveled abroad as an undergraduate student on a college winter immersion trip to Yucatán, the Mexican state known for its Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean beaches and Mayan ruins.

She visited massive pyramids and stone temples. She ate traditional cuisine, used the Spanish she knew and immersed herself into a vibrant culture that was all unfamiliar. Elizabeth Larson in the Dominican Republic in 2016. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Larson Download Full Image

“As a young person at that time, I fell in love with language, with travel, with people, with Mexico and Latin America,” Larson recalled. “That was my first experience traveling out of the country and I couldn’t get enough of it and I couldn’t stop.”

She started to laugh. “I’ve never stopped since.”

Now, Larson, a human, social and cultural geographer, and senior lecturer in ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning for nearly 20 years, retired this year. In her tenure, she’s introduced tens of thousands of students to foreign places, cultures and world crises.

She draws on her travels and global refugee research to center her teaching beyond just the facts but on the human condition and experience of individual lives from around the globe.

“Beth Larson is a kind and compassionate person who possesses acute social and cultural sensibilities. This nourishes her teaching, which helps students understand people and places far and wide,” said Kevin McHugh, professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and colleague of Larson’s for 18 years. “Beth has long been a champion of human rights and she has been engaged in peace studies, something I have always admired.”

“She is a gifted teacher whose impact on ASU students over these many years is immeasurable.”

Geography and an evolving world

Elizabeth Larson

Especially drawn to advancing the understanding of peoples and places subject to political conflict, poverty and displacement, early in her career, Larson was one of the first researchers in the country to study populations and migrations of refugees academically.

Using a geographical lens, Larson studied Central American refugee populations, their integrations into their "host" countries and their movement. Her field research took her around the world, meeting and connecting with people of diverse backgrounds from Costa Rica to Nicaragua to El Salvador to Guatemala and beyond.

“People can move individually, but if you have mass people moving across the borders something is going on in their country and they’re fearing for their lives,” Larson said. “I was really looking at these ideas about war, struggle and suffering, peace and all those ideas around the refugee movement.”

Fitting the world into the classroom

Larson’s ASU story began in 2003, following more than a decade of teaching at other colleges across the country. She taught a variety of human and regional geography courses, and in each, drew on her personal experiences abroad with an emphasis on cultural richness, diversity and humanness in her lessons.

“She was my first human geography teacher. From the very first lesson, I quickly realized that there was a lot that I neglected or paid little attention to,” said Gabby Kauffmann, a former student of Larson’s at ASU. “Dr. Larson made geography personal.”

Over the course of her tenure at ASU, Larson taught nearly a dozen courses ranging from population geography to human geography to society and environment to geography courses that explored Latin America, the Middle East, north Africa and middle America.

She evolved and taught the widely popular course Geography of World Crises, introducing students to current and past global calamities, and brought together geographical concepts and storytelling through literature, incorporating especially moving stories such as Khaled Hosseini's “The Kite Runner” in her teaching.

“Dr. L gave me the opportunity to see geography from another perspective. She got me to think about issues that I had never really given much thought to or didn't know that I had an interest in,” said Kelli Roseberry, a former student and ASU alumna. “Dr. L loves people and loves teaching. She truly cares about each person and is also passionate about learning from her students.”

Students recall that Larson not only encouraged learning from her lessons, but from each other. She encouraged her students to share their own varying experiences and backgrounds, and created an open and welcoming space for students to speak their minds.

“Dr. Larson is and always will be my favorite teacher I have ever taken in my academic learning,” said Josh Jablonsky, an ASU alumnus, who took six of Larson’s classes. “Dr. Larson taught me to be open minded, always do your research so you can contribute to the conversation, as well as always look at problems through other people's perspectives.”

Combining service and learning

At the heart of all her work, Larson says, is a value instilled in her since childhood: service.

Growing up in Rice Lake, a quiet town in northern Wisconsin known for its farmed wild rice and warm hospitality, Larson was a middle child of six brothers and sisters, raised by parents who emphasized kindness, acceptance and caring for others.

If there was a kid at school being bullied, Larson was always befriending that person. At every birthday party she had, she never excluded anyone.

“We did things through the church or community, if someone was sick or someone passed away, we made the casserole to take to the house or we cleaned up the church after the funeral dinner, things like that,” Larson recalled. “We were always doing something.”

It’s this spirit that she took into her research and passed forward through her teaching.

Combining service and learning, Larson simultaneously exposed students to the needs of society, and the opportunities to get engaged to help.

Larson served as the faculty adviser for half a dozen student organizations committed to service, including COAR (Community Outreach Advocacy for Refugees), Devils Pitching In, Stand Up for Kids, Nourish International, Global Outreach and Student Social Network for Global Education alongside others.

She also spearheaded and organized the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning’s annual volunteer holiday campaign, which sponsors local, newly settled refugee families through the International Rescue Committee.

She was a founding member of the ASU School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) committee, a community-development visioning and workshop facilitator for Arizona Indigenous tribes, and an Arizona Geographic Alliance affiliate faculty member who gave talks to K–12 teachers about global issues and the world’s changing demographics.

“The most important lessons I learned from Dr. Larson was the importance of continuing to educate yourself on issues around the world and the importance of even small acts of advocacy,” said Ashley Thompson, ASU alumnus and former COAR student president. “Dr. Larson worked so hard to encourage all of her students, both within her classes and without, to participate in advocacy acts, like hosting or participating in drives for toiletries and other needed goods for refugees or children being detained at the border.

“I feel so privileged to have gotten to work with Dr. Larson during her time at ASU. She is so kind and has such a passion for service for others.”