Water Recycling
The malting process uses significant volumes of water and, at both of our malting sites, we have aerobic water treatment plants to ensure our wastewater is safe to be discharged.
At our Tweed Valley Maltings, we have a Reverse Osmosis (RO) plant, which gives us the ability to treat used process water that would ordinarily be discharged and reuse it.
This process produces water of a potable quality and, not only does it significantly reduce demand on the area's water resources and boreholes we abstract from, but it also reduces the amount of wastewater we discharge.
Although we're constantly striving to reduce our water use, it's important to acknowledge that there may be years where water use is increased due to factors such as barley quality, which can affect water uptake during the steeping process.
For example, the quality of the 2023 barley harvest meant that our total water use in 2024 was the highest it had been since 2018, but we also had our highest recycling rate to date.
We are continuing to improve and fine tune our tank settings and are continuously reviewing our site water use.
Awareness and education training initiatives are active throughout our production teams across all sites, and water use forms a fundamental part of our sustainability and environmental modules during the induction and onboarding process.
