BIER Further Evolves Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions Sector Guidance

August 1, 2019 /3BL Media/ The Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable (BIER) has made further enhancements and additions to the Beverage Industry Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions Sector Guidance (4.0) published in December 2018. This enhanced document represents version 4.1 of the Guidance and continues BIER’s ambition of providing supplementary guidance specific to beverage companies for greater consistency, accuracy, and leadership with GHG accounting and management.    For the beverage industry, as for all industries, the ability to make informed decisions on GHG reduction efforts and climate change mitigation is dependent upon an accurate inventory of all relevant GHG emissions associated with a company, its value chain, and the life cycles of its products. The BIER Sector Guide is intended to provide supplementary guidance to primary global GHG protocols, with the objective of creating beverage sector consensus and consistency on inventory scoping, calculation steps, and data use.    BIER identified that this was an important time to update the previous version of the sector guidance as members further addressed complex aspects of GHG accounting and reached consensus approaches.    What’s New? Key updates were made to: • Appendix E (How to Report Purchased CO2),  • Appendix G (Calculation Examples for Emissions from Spirits Production),  • Appendix H (Guidance for Calculation of Packaging Materials Emissions), and  • Appendix J (Guidance for Calculation of Cooling Emissions).   These updates provide additional guidance and calculation examples, as well as textual revisions in various sections to clarify guidance and further align with the latest versions of leading protocols and beverage category rules.    “The BIER member’s desire to maintain this as a living and continuously evolving Sector Guide is testament to the leadership of these companies, and to our realization that pursuing environmental sustainability is a journey. Complacency is not an option,” says Nick Martin, Executive Director of BIER.    The complete guidance document is available for download at: http://bit.ly/GHGEmissionsGuidance