In Japan, fashion is brewing craft beers. But it produces a lot of waste, which the country has decided to recycle.
Across Japan, small producers are starting to brew new drinks. A production that produces a lot of waste related to the brewing of beer: leftover malt or hops used in recipes. So to produce cleaner, Japanese companies are starting to recycle this waste. They turn it into paper, packaging, and even jeans.
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Several Japanese companies are working on this subject. This waste has a special name. In the industry, we talk about spent grains. It is a kind of beer pulp where we find the remains of the different cereals used during the different stages of brewing: wheat, rye or barley. And each liter of beer produced and well generates almost 300 grams of spent grain.
Start-ups to recycle waste
The big traditional brewers have networks to get rid of this material. Either they dry it and it can become animal feed, or the spent grains are used in incinerators. But it’s more complicated for the small brewers that we see appearing everywhere with this fashion for craft beer. So, Japanese start-ups offer to take charge of this waste and reuse it for other productions.
AT In Yokohama, very close to Tokyo, the Kitafuku company recovers this spent grain for free to make recycled paper, drawing inspiration from the methods used for paper made from rice plants in particular. Their beer paper is then resold to brewers to make packaging; to restaurants who use it to make menus or to cardboard producers to make delivery boxes.
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Making jeans with beer
It is also possible to make jeans with this beer paper, but the recipe is a little more complicated and more expensive. The grains are transformed into paper fiber, but they must then be compacted and treated to successfully create a weaving yarn that will make it possible to create a sufficiently resistant denim fabric.
The experiment is being conducted there by the Japanese brewer Sapporo Breweries with the jeans manufacturer Shima Denim Works, which specializes in the manufacture of canvas made from sugar cane bagasse. The result is very beautiful but very expensive jeans. For jeans “in beer”, it takes 42,000 yen, that is to say 290 euros.
The price did not scare Japanese collectors. They emptied the stock in minutes when the first jeans went on sale a few months ago. And we do not know if a new collection will soon be brewed.