MBAX 6990 Week 4 Sustainability Claims Audit Example

What Quarry Hill Says and What It Could Count: A Sustainability Audit Comparing Four Public Claims With an Emissions Inventory Built From the Brewery's Own Bills

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Walden University

MBAX 6990: Capstone: Sustainable Business Practice and Strategies

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

What Quarry Hill Says and What It Could Count: A Sustainability Audit Comparing Four Public Claims With an Emissions Inventory Built From the Brewery's Own Bills

Four Claims, Quoted

Quarry Hill Brewing, this capstone's composite western Massachusetts brewery, makes four sustainability claims on its website and packaging. They are quoted here as written:

1. "Brewed with 100 percent renewable electricity."

2. "Good stewards of our local water."

3. "Every bottle is recyclable."

4. "We pay every employee a fair wage."

This audit tests each against what the brewery could actually count, using an emissions inventory built from its utility bills and purchasing records for the most recent year. All figures are illustrative.

The Inventory, Scope by Scope

The inventory follows the corporate standard of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which divides emissions into three scopes (World Resources Institute, 2004). In practice, the brewery's own boilers and kettles fall in the first scope, the power it buys in the second and everything upstream and downstream, from glass and malt to delivery trucks, in the third.

The table shows where the brewery's footprint lies. Its own operations, Scopes 1 and 2, account for only about a quarter of the total. Glass and malt, both purchased, make up two-thirds. Any claim about the brewery's environmental performance that addresses only its own operations addresses a minority of its effect.

Table 1

Quarry Hill Emissions Inventory, Illustrative

Composite organization; emission factors are published averages applied to illustrative activity data.

How the Inventory Was Built

Each line rests on a record the brewery already keeps. Natural gas comes from twelve months of utility bills, converted with a standard emission factor for natural gas combustion. Electricity comes from the same year's bills and a regional grid factor. Glass and malt come from purchase invoices, multiplied by published average emission factors for container glass and malted barley. Distribution is estimated from distributors' route mileage. The glass and malt factors carry the most uncertainty, since they depend on the supplier's furnace and the farms' practices, but even at the low end of published ranges they remain the two largest lines.

Claim 1: Renewable Electricity

The brewery buys renewable energy certificates equal to its electricity use, so on a market-based accounting basis, which the Greenhouse Gas Protocol allows to be reported alongside location-based figures, its Scope 2 emissions could be reported as near zero. The claim is therefore defensible as worded. But it covers about 200 tons, under a tenth of the footprint, and the certificates do not change the electricity actually drawn from the regional grid. A reader of "100 percent renewable electricity" might reasonably infer a much larger environmental achievement than the inventory supports.

Claim 2: Water Stewardship

The brewery uses about 5.5 barrels of water per barrel of beer, in the middle of the published range for craft breweries. It has not measured or reduced its water use in recent years, and its wastewater carries enough organic load to incur a municipal surcharge. "Good stewards" is vague enough to be hard to disprove, but nothing in the brewery's records supports it as a description of performance rather than intention. The rinse-water recovery project under study would give the claim substance.

Claim 3: The Glass Line

"Every bottle is recyclable" is true: glass can be recycled. But recyclable is not the same as recycled, and recycling glass recovers far less of its embodied emissions than reusing it. In the two deposit states, redemption rates for beer bottles are high, but in New Hampshire many bottles end up in mixed recycling or landfill. More importantly, the glass line is the single largest item in the inventory. Life cycle studies find that single-use glass has among the highest footprints of common drink containers, and that reuse sharply reduces it when bottles make many trips (Amienyo et al., 2013). The claim directs attention to the end of the bottle's life, where the brewery's control is weakest, rather than to the choice of single-use glass, where its control is strongest.

Claim 4: Fair Wages

The fourth claim is social and does not appear in an emissions inventory. Quarry Hill's lowest-paid production workers earn about $19 an hour, above the state minimum wage, and all full-time staff receive health coverage. Whether that is "fair" depends on a standard the brewery does not state. An audit can note that the claim is undefined and suggest the brewery name its benchmark, such as a published living wage estimate for its county.

Findings

Two claims are defensible as worded but narrow, one is undefined and one, water stewardship, lacks evidence. The inventory shows that glass is the brewery's largest controllable effect, which strengthens the case for studying returnable bottles. Elkington (1997) argued that sustainability reporting should measure performance rather than advertise intentions; Quarry Hill's claims would be stronger if tied to its own measured figures, especially for water and glass.

References

Amienyo, D., Gujba, H., Stichnothe, H., & Azapagic, A. (2013). Life cycle environmental impacts of carbonated soft drinks. International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 18(1), 77-92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-012-0459-y

Elkington, J. (1997). Cannibals with forks: The triple bottom line of 21st century business. Capstone.

World Resources Institute. (2004). The greenhouse gas protocol: A corporate accounting and reporting standard (Rev. ed.). World Resources Institute and World Business Council for Sustainable Development.