This paper presents the design of a large water system within the production and packaging areas of a brewery. In order to accomplish the task, mathematical models were developed based on a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) formulation from the open literature. These models enable the investigation of several integration options: a) direct water re-use between batch and semi-continuous consumers operating within the same time interval and b) regeneration re-use options, by designing and scheduling an on-site wastewater treatment system. A multilevel strategy was applied for this large-scale industrial problem, which firstly decomposes design problem into several smaller integration problems concerning water consumers within each section of the brewery. At the following level, water re-use and regeneration re-use opportunities between the brewhouse and the packaging areas were explored for each working day. Finally, the design of an integrated water system was performed over the entire working week by fixing identified intra-daily matches between sections. An optimum water integration scheme is proposed based on the results obtained.
COBISS.SI-ID: 15125014
Breweries are responding to some sustainability challenges but many of them find sustainability assessment and reporting to be very complex, difficult, and time-consuming tasks. Despite several existing frameworks for the sustainability assessment of companies, none of them specifically addresses breweries. The proposed methodology gradually aggregates sustainable development indicators into sustainability sub-indices and, finally, to a composite sustainability index that tracks integrated information on the economic, environmental, and societal performances of a brewery over time. They can be used both internally, for the identification of 'hot spots' and externally, for sustainability reporting and stakeholder engagement. Since breweries strive to outperform their competitors, the proposed methodology enables the benchmarking of a brewery against best performance practices, as a catalyst for improvement and innovation, by providing benchmark values for each indicator. The case study presented in this article illustrates how the proposed methodology could be easily applied in practice, and stimulates breweries to test their effectiveness themselves.
COBISS.SI-ID: 15021334