Diageo’s €169m Brewhouse No 4 at St James’s Gate has become the first major brewery in the world and the first manufacturing plant in Ireland to achieve the highest award possible in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.
The Platinum LEED Certification was awarded to Diageo by Rick Fedrizzi, CEO of the US Green Building Council, in a ceremony at St James Gate last night. LEED certification is an internationally recognised benchmark for green certification developed by the US Green Building Council to promote sustainability in the building and construction industry.
According to Diageo, Brewhouse No 4 is the world’s largest stout brewhouse capable of producing 300,000 pints in every two-hour brew.
The company said a range of efficiencies and energy savings have been made since Brewhouse No 4 was opened last September. For example, the electricity savings from the project are equivalent to the electricity consumption of 2,760 houses. Production requires 33pc less thermal energy resulting in steam savings the equivalent of 32,000 barrels of oil. The new brewhouse uses 14pc less water to make a brew.
In addition, St James’s Gate has started extracting and treating its own water on site, taking 500,000 m3 of demand off the Dublin City drinking water network. This is equivalent to one week of water production for the entire city.
Diageo said the overall energy saved in one year by the development of Brewhouse No 4 is equivalent to the total energy consumed by the entire Irish industrial sector in one day.
““St James’s Gate is a unique space – a city centre brewery over 250 years old that is now one of the most environmentally sustainable industrial sites in the world,” said Fedrizzi. “There are very few LEED Platinum industrial buildings around the world quite simply because to reach this level of certification requires a company to push boundaries and consider a whole new way of thinking about how a company impacts on the environment.