Ska Brewing Co. wants to improve its sustainability efforts through a series of changes coming in 2023.

Ska has always made efforts to be a sustainable company, owner Dave Thibodeau said. This includes using recycled jeans in the walls as insulation, reusing bowling alley wood as tables and installing solar panels.

However, the company still looks for ways to improve its efforts.

The brewery is changing the way it packages beer to allow the use of paperboard can collars instead of plastic. Ska will do this by installing a machine made by WestRock that takes 24 beer cans, divides them into four 6-packs and places the paperboard collars around the package.

In 2019, the Center for International Environmental Law estimated that production and incineration of plastic would add 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere – the equivalent of 189 coal-fired power plants.

In recent years, many breweries have gone away from using the plastic six-pack rings in favor of the PakTech plastic can collars. Thibodeau said he preferred the paperboard collar option because less plastic is used to make them.

“The PakTech collars are more plastic than the plastic rings, so that wasn't a more sustainable solution in our minds,” said Thibodeau.

The paperboard collars are resistant to moisture, which prevents them from falling apart because of condensation on the can.

Furthermore, Ska has also moved toward composting its spent grain by giving it to local recycling company Table to Farm Compost. Spent grain is the waste created during the brewing process. Ska will add a spent grain silo system to their brewery to collect the spent grain. The company also has a 4,000 gallon tanker truck to transport the grain to Table to Farm.

Previously, Ska donated its spent grains to local cattle farmers who would use the grains to feed their cattle, but Thibodeau said at times it would end up in the landfill.

The brewery received a $200,000 grant from Colorado Department of Health and Environment for the additions relating to spent grain. In total, these changes will cost around $300,000.

“The ultimate goal is to become zero waste here at the brewery and divert everything from the landfill,” said Thibodeau.

He said cattle do not do a good job of digesting the lignin and cellulose in the spent grain, which creates methane through cattle flatulence. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, methane accounts for 20% of global emissions and is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

To put it in perspective, Ska is projected to go through at least two million pounds of spent grain per year.

Table to Farm will receive the grain and then sell it to people who want use it as fertilizer or for other composting purposes. Thibodeau hopes he can complete the recycling process by taking the grain compost and returning it to the farms Ska uses to grow grain in the San Luis Valley, but nothing about this process has been confirmed.

The brewery is also looking into how it can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide it uses, which is partly a result of a nationwide shortage of carbon dioxide.

“We've now started naturally carbonating our beer in the fermenter instead of buying all and injecting our carbon dioxide,” said Thibodeau.

The process is called spunding, which uses a device called a spunding valve that attaches to a fermentation tank late in the fermenting process when most of the sugars in the wort have been processed by the yeast.

The spunding valve controls the release of CO2, which­ keeps the tank pressurized and naturally carbonates the beer.

“That's been a big process change that also helps the quality of the beer. It makes the bubbles finer and smaller and therefore, makes the beer a little creamier and smoother to drink,” Thibodeau said.

The addition of these new sustainability initiatives will also add four more jobs at Ska. Thibodeau wants to hire a driver for the compost truck, another marketing staff member for the composting campaign and two more employees to work on the packaging lines.

tbrown@durangoherald.com