- [Narrator] Throughout the country, people are planting seeds of innovation.

Harvesting a bounty of ideas to help care for the only home we have, planet Earth.

The core of sustainability is meeting the needs of today's society without compromising the world for future generations.

With billions of people on earth and climate change a reality, it's more important than ever to open our eyes and minds to alternative ideas, both new and old, about food production, renewable energy, a circular economy, and more.

This series explores eco-friendly ideas and lifestyles that help to make our world a little bit better.

Welcome to My World Too, short stories of sustainable living and earthly innovations.

(gentle music) - Okay, this view is incredible.

I mean, we are minutes from downtown Kansas City.

We are right in the mix of everything.

You can get like, a really good view of the city and the community that you all serve.

- It's very important to us.

I mean we're right here in the heart of Kansas City, which is right in the middle of the heartland, and we are surrounded by agriculture, rivers, wildlife, and it's very important that we take care of this environment that's doing a good job of taking care of us and buying our beer.

- Right, this is cool.

I love it up here.

Like, you wouldn't be able to get me down from up here.

- [Narrator] The Boulevard Brewing Company has been making craft beer for over 30 years, with a profound sense of social responsibility embedded in their DNA.

The brewing facility follows a zero landfill policy to promote a healthier planet.

Whitney Manney visits the brewery to learn more.

- This is an amazing facility.

This is my first time here, so I am like in awe of everything that I am seeing today.

Thank you so much for having us.

- It is our pleasure.

And I'm glad you feel the same excitement that we do when we step in this building every day working here.

- This is so awesome.

Can you explain to me, there's so much happening, and the campus is so expansive and very well thought out.

I can tell there's a lot of intention behind everything that you all are doing.

What green efforts are you all putting into this campus just to make everything happen?

- What do we do?

Let me see, how much time do we have?

Because it is expansive.

It actually goes back to like kind of when we were founded, our founder, John McDonald, has a profound sense of respecting the environment.

He is a, he's a proponent of responsible environmental business practice, but he also knows that the product that we make, beer, all the ingredients are raw ingredients that come from the earth.

So we understand, we kind of have to take, we have to protect where that comes from.

So it has been embedded in our DNA from the beginning that we need to be responsible and take care of the environment.

- A lot of people forget that beer is an agricultural product.

So it all starts with the barley.

We used to get all of our raw material shipped here in trucks, and it's trucks get really bad gas mileage.

So now we've actually switched to about 50% of it coming through a train load site.

So we can get it by train or by rail, and it's way more efficient.

- So can you walk me through a little bit of the process of what does sustainability mean to beer?

Because sustainability can mean so many things to other industries, but how can sustainability be specific to beer?

- Our founder, John McDonald, he's very very green and I always tell new hires, I'm like, if you're green or not, you are now at work here because John is so you are.

It's part of our new hire training.

When you, when you come in, you know, every new hire has like safety training, right?

And SOP training, they also have, we call it like green training.

Our brewhouse, we bought the most efficient brewhouse we could find.

We want a brew house that uses like less steam, gentler on the materials.

Anything we can do to get all of the sugar outta that malt so that we're not just throwing things away.

- When this building was built in 2007, you can see as you walk through, there's not a lot of electric light.

We have big windows so that we can make use of natural light year round.

In 2010, this facility became a zero landfill facility, which means that basically no waste goes out to a landfill.

We have efforts in place to kind of divide up how we throw things away.

It used to be you would have one waste container at your desk.

Now we have dozens and they're all designed for various types of paper or cardboard or composting your food or aluminum.

You kind of, you get the idea.

And anything that can't be recycled, reduced, reused, we send off to a company called Lafarge and they burn that waste for energy, but also it becomes ash because they produce concrete.

- I'm just curious, is that practice implemented throughout the building?

Like even in the offices?

- Every single thing, the office is the easy spot.

Because like I went from having one garbage can to 10.

But it's really difficult downstairs on the processing floor.

Because in the office, you're making it like a tiny little bit of garbage.

Downstairs we're making huge 2000 pound piles of garbage every day.

It even goes back to as far as our bottles.

We realized a long time ago, a lot of people drink Boulevard beer, which means a lot of bottles are going into landfills.

And that takes up a lot of space and it's bad for the environment.

And at the time Kansas City had no real good glass recycling solution.

So John McDonald, our founder, got with some like-minded business owners in Kansas City and started a company called Ripple Glass, which is just a glass collection site.

It's a sorting facility.

And we put these bins throughout the metro for consumers to take their consumer glass and they could just drop it off.

And it didn't matter if it was an olive oil bottle, if it was a liquor bottle or if it was a Boulevard beer bottle.

And what Ripple does, it separates those glass.

So green glass gets ground to cullet and becomes fiberglass insulation.

And all the brown bottles that go in those bins and get sorted, those also get ground to cullet and sent back to our bottle manufacturer to be put in the fill to become brand new beer bottles.

So it's this really cool beer circle of life.

- So it really works out sustainably for the earth.

But also I mean, that's a good business practice 'cause at the end of the day, you know, you kind of gotta look out for that bottom line.

- Totally, yeah.

And we factor that in.

I mean, for us being sustainable and protecting the environment isn't just an added thing.

It's part of who we are.

But we are aware that our things that we do or changes that we make can also benefit us.

One example is our building has two solar arrays, an 18 kilowatt photovoltaic array, and a 200 kilowatt photovoltaic array.

And what those produce, they offset our energy usage.

And usually we tell people when they ask, well how much energy is that?

It's about the amount of energy several households would need to operate annually.

- So as a company, are you all kind of sitting down quarterly or annually and saying, here's where we can implement more sustainability practices?

Or is it something that you're just kind of thinking of every day?

- Even in the beer world, we can't just produce a beer and let it go and hope it does well.

We have a strong focus on everything we do, and whether it's, you know, the best way to make beer, the most efficient way to make beer, or ways that we can improve our day-to-day work.

For example, when our beer, when our brew house was installed in 2007, it was considered the most efficient brew house in the world.

- Oh.

- Because we had some clever engineers that created what we call a vapor lock over the boil kettle.

And as you're boiling liquid, you're producing steam.

And most often you just send that steam off into the, into the air.

But what we do is we, after we've boiled it and we volatilize any compounds we don't want in that, we capture that steam and we use that steam to recirculate and kind of insulate the water pipes or keep the containers hot.

- Okay.

- And that, it does two things for us.

It reduces the amount of energy we need to boil water, but it also reduces the amount of water that we produce or that we waste.

Because traditionally it takes about six gallons of water to make one gallon of beer.

With this system, we've gotten that down to just over four gallons of water for one gallon of beer.

And we make about five million gallons of beer a year.

So when you do that math, you can see how much water we're conserving and also reducing our overhead on our costs, our energy bills.

(gentle music) - Can you talk a little bit about the recycling process as far as the spent grain?

- Yeah, spent grain, what we do, we have a really good relationship with a feed lot here in town.

So when we use the malted barley, when we pull all the sugar out of it, the only thing that's left is like fiber and husks and like things that we cannot digest as people, but cows can.

So we sell all of it, we sell it all of it very very cheap to a guy named Pat Ross.

He owns a feedlot, and so it becomes cattle feed.

And then it gets better than that though, because Pat actually feeds all the cattle and he supplies all of the cattle to a place called Bichelmeyer Meats which is about two miles down the road.

Bichelmeyer Meats was one of the last original slaughterhouses that was left.

So basically, if you buy like a Boulevard Pale Ale and a steak from Bichelmeyer there's a pretty good chance that the grain that that cow ate also made your beer that you're drinking.

- So this, you all have also done, from what I'm can understand, y'all have done a good job of creating like a local ecosystem.

Like you're able to work with a lot of businesses that are close to you all and like recycle and reuse.

And it benefits you all, you know, as a business, but also just sustainably for the earth.

So also I've noticed within the recent years you all have moved to aluminum cans.

Was that a conscious effort also?

- The whole industry is going toward cans.

And that is a financial consideration because customers want cans.

- Right.

- But also the silver lining on that is that cans are way more recyclable, yeah.

(gentle music) - So in comparison to other breweries of you all's size, do you feel like Boulevard is leading the way?

Or do you feel like you all still have room to grow?

- We absolutely have room to grow and I would say the brewing community kind of all feel the same way.

Most craft breweries in the United States understand the importance of a protecting our environment, especially in this, in this climate.

Climate change in our ecosystem is getting stressed daily.

Brewers have a profound sense of protecting the environment that produces the raw materials they need.

And I would say that while in some cases maybe we are innovative and we are leading the way, but we also look around at our friends and neighbors and see what they're doing and we share techniques and find new ways to become more efficient.

(gentle music) - Okay, so you all have a public facing component within Boulevard doing the tours, the beer hall as well.

How does sustainability come into there?

Because you want the people that's coming into you all's space to, you know, basically get in line.

- Sure, yeah.

We have thousands of visitors weekly and we find it, it's a really good opportunity for us to educate the consumers.

- Right.

- But also when people come to the beer hall just casually for a beer, they're kind of faced with what we're doing when they go to throw things away.

So it's not even the containers in our office, but it's also in the beer hall when a consumer is done eating or drinking and they have to, you know, take their their trash away.

They see they're kind of forced with that choice, and they have to make a concerted effort in thinking about how they're disposing their waste.

I would also say Kansas City has embraced this very well.

When we go back talking about Ripple Glass, we put those bins out there with no real expectation that it would get used in the way that it has.

And we see people in line waiting to dump the glass from the party they had the weekend or just the, the recyclables that don't fit in their, in the city's recycle bin.

Over the past, since Ripple Glass has been, Ripple Glass has been in place, we've recycled over a billion beer bottles.

And that's, that's not us.

I mean, we do drink our fair amount of beer.

But that is all consumers.

- That's the community.

- That's taking it out to the community.

and we're seeing people do their own part.

Our founder, John McDonald, he, he told us many years ago at a meeting one day, he said something that stuck with all of us.

And he said, it's never wrong to do the right thing.

And we think that applies to our sustainability efforts, our eco-friendly efforts, and how we manipulate and operate and just maneuver through the brewery and our own lives.

And we carry that over.

(gentle music) - So Boulevard has come a long way and you all have grown exponentially.

Can you talk about what you see happening in the industry and what do you think it's like in the future for brewing companies that kind of compare to you all's size?

- Yeah, this is one of the reasons why I love this industry.

When I was younger, I started in a, like heavy industry.

Food plants, auto plants, and everything is driven by money.

Like, if it's cheaper, you'll do it.

If it costs more, you won't.

In the brewing industry at Boulevard, and also other places that are our size, these guys, they're not your average CEO.

They're CEOs who care about not just the environment, but about the people.

- Right.

- So they will do things with no return on investment.

So to set up a recycling program, it's not cheap at the beginning.

There's an initial investment.

Brewing guys, or brewers will do it.

Other places I'm not so sure, it's harder with them.

When we built this building, the bottle line was kind of dark, a lot of fluorescent harsh lighting.

So he put a skylight in and there's like, it's a huge skylight and there's zero return.

He just said, my friend's down there need sunlight so that's what we're gonna do.

- Also, we have a green roof.

And that green roof was put in place in order to kind of offset our energy usage as well.

It provides insulation, it keeps us a little bit cooler in the summer, and it keeps us a little bit warmer in the winter.

And that green roof also, it does what a green roof does, it absorbs CO2, it produces oxygen, and it also collects water from like rainwater.

Preventing a lot of runoff into the city as well.

- Okay.

Why are these initiatives so important to not only Boulevard, but the craft brewing industry at large?

- So we've been making beer for about 35 years, and in a perfect world, we would continue making beer for 35 years.

But we can only keep making beer if the earth is able to produce the ingredients that we need to make it.

And you know, it would be naive and irresponsible for us as a company to not rededicate or refocus our efforts on protecting the environment that provides us with what we use and we use a lot of agricultural goods.

And we wanna make sure that we're doing the best, that we can leave the earth in the best condition as possible to continue that not only for us, but for future generations.

- Do you have any hopes for the future as far as the craft brewing industry goes that you hope to see?

- If, I mean personally, I just hope to see this, this focus continue.

- Yeah.

- You know, a lot of breweries are doing a lot of really amazing things that we can, we can take cues from.

And we hope that we can keep doing things that other breweries and other companies outside of the brewing industry that might also take cues from us and start applying those efforts.

I would love to be able to walk into any convenience store, grocery store, supermarket, or business that I have to visit and not see one trash can, but see many and know what those are used for and how to use them.

And knowing that the effect that it has at large in protecting the earth.

- Well Adam, this has been incredibly insightful.

Again, such an amazing facility and it's been amazing to learn about what's happening right here in our community and just how much work you all are putting into this and how it really affects our city and the country as a whole.

Thank you so much for having us.

- It's my pleasure.

- Awesome.

- Should we go get a beer?

- Let's go.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] The Kansas Alliance of Wetlands and Streams is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the restoration and protection of the watersheds in the state of Kansas.

Nick Schmitz learns why watersheds are so important and what work is being done to save them.

- Andrew, how's it going?

- So nice to meet you.

- Thank you.

- So the Kansas Alliance for Wetlands and Streams, what, what is that, what is KAWS and what do you guys do?

- So KAWS is a conservation nonprofit that was started in the nineties and we're about connecting the waters and lands and people of Kansas.

A big part of it is working on conservation of the quality of these aquatic resources as well as the quantity.

And we work with different conservation partners to make that happen.

Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, Ducks Unlimited, Playa Lakes joint venture, Friends of the Kaw.

We all work with them in different ways to achieve these goals.

- We're watershed coordinators, so we both have degrees in some sort of environmental aspect.

And so we are in specific watersheds as coordinators to work one-on-one with landowners, counties, to address water quality issues that we know exist in those areas.

- We do that informed by the water quality testing that we do.

So typically these major water sources like the Kaw and its tributaries can tell us a lot about the land use strategies within a specific watershed.

- And so across Kansas there are 34 active watersheds.

We are part of the WRAPS watershed coordinators, which is the Watershed Restoration and Protection Strategy.

Kansas loves their acronyms.

So us watershed coordinators, we are in specific watersheds across the state of Kansas.

And so we know what the impairment or the pollutant that's the highest priority within that watershed that we should be working on.

Whether it's e coli bacteria or nutrients like phosphorus, nitrogen, atrazine, sedimentation is a big one.

So we each have our own individual goals within the watershed that we are working to address with whatever the land use is, whether it's urban, agriculture, we can work with them one-on-one to help protect water quality.

- So it seemed to me that education is really key and maybe a lot of these farmers and ranchers have never really thought about it.

They're not adverse to the idea of making changes, they just has never been presented to them.

- Yeah, I would say like watershed conservation isn't at like the forefront of people's minds when they're running their business.

And so a lot of times it just takes us knocking on the door or trying to find where they're gonna meet for a coffee meeting or a conservation district meeting and just presenting it to them.

- They don't know what they don't know right?

- And, and all of your funding comes from the EPA, is that correct?

- Yeah, it's EPA funding with the Clean Water Act that gets filtered through the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and Administrative there.

- And how does it work with the farmer when you do a project?

Do they get reimbursed?

Do they put the money forward first or do they, or do you cut them a check and then?

- Typically they pay for the project up front and we pay on actual invoices.

We do want the landowners that we work with to have a stake in the project.

So there is a percentage you could say that they pay.

Sometimes it's just their labor, their labor building it, designing it, going to get the materials.

But we are able to pay for a percentage, usually the higher cost items that they otherwise wouldn't be able to, to afford to do the projects.

(gentle music) So Nick, this is Chris Campbell.

He is a landowner in northeast Kansas that we did a project with.

We realized that he needed some help with his overall operation and also that we could benefit water quality with the project that we did with him.

- And had you noticed some issues with the, with the creek and, and with the way that your, your cattle were grazing?

- As a producer getting cows to fresh water is a problem.

If it's muddy, they get mud on their rudders.

If they're nursing, the calves don't want to drink, you get scours.

It can just snowball on you.

- And so Megan, walk me through a little bit of, of how you start when you engage with a, with a producer, with a farmer, what is it that you do and how do you, how do you start the action plan?

So usually I listen to what the landowner needs.

So he was having an issue with the cattle utilizing the creek as a drinking source.

He wasn't very happy about that for multiple different reasons.

And so we work with them to see what does your overall land look like?

How can we improve things not only for the landowner and their overall operation, but also for the environment and specifically water quality, what we work on.

And so we take that into account, where are other water sources?

How can we get the cattle further away from the creek and still establish an operation that works for the landowner, but also benefits what we're going for.

- So guys, can you walk me through exactly what was done on, on this land?

- The cattle were all concentrated down here drinking out of the creek, polluting it.

And so by running that water line from a well up at their house all the way up this hill here, we were able to establish a water source that's further away from the creek.

So when the cattle are up there drinking and their manure and their waste is around, it is filtering.

It's still gonna run off in rain events, but it's filtering through that pasture and through that grass.

So it's removing all of the pollutants and the impairments before it reaches the creek and the surface water and goes downstream.

- And Chris, what has the result been?

Have you seen a difference in the, the how clean the creek is?

- Absolutely.

I mean, it cleaned up within a couple months.

- So Megan, when we're looking, looking at a creek like this and Chris is talking about the cattle going through it and stirring up the mud and cattle waste, why is that posing a problem?

I mean, it looks like just a small little creek.

- Yes, yeah.

So where we're at right now is a part of the lower Kansas River watershed.

So this little creek is a part of that whole watershed.

So this is a Little Stranger Creek and this area is impaired for e coli bacteria.

So we know that there are pollutants and impairments and we kind of have 'em listed in priority.

This area specifically has an e coli issue that comes directly from livestock.

There's a lot of other sources, but that's what we're addressing at this location.

And so Little Stranger Creek then drains into Stranger Creek proper, which is a much larger system.

And Stranger Creek flows into the Kansas River, bigger river, then then flows into the Missouri River, the Mississippi River, and all of those pollutants picking up others along the way eventually makes its way down into the Gulf of Mexico.

- So if you can clean up here at the source, it helps tremendously down the line.

- Yes, yeah, yeah.

So just one project and fixing the pollutants that are coming off of just his field.

If we can do that with multiple people down the line, we're having a greater impact.

(gentle music) - So this is the watering system that you installed?

- Yes, we have one here and one in the East Pasture.

It's just a frost free, no power.

You don't need electricity.

It's very simple float system.

And this tube goes into ground seven foot.

So it is kept from freezing from the ground heat.

- Okay.

- It's an insulated tube and we installed a matting around it and put some gravel on top so the cattle wouldn't sink and they just come up here.

- So you're running a line from your, you have a private well up by the house.

- Yes.

- And you're running a line from there to here.

- Right.

- Which is feeding this.

So Megan, this is a pretty easy solution to the problem.

So if you got farmers all in the area to start installing these, what kind of a difference would that make?

- Right, right, it's a huge impact.

So what seems like such a simple project to do, if we look at the whole scope of it, right, we've got the creek down here behind us that's down slope.

Putting the cattle up here on top of the hill on a flat surface and a relatively easy project.

I didn't construct it, he did.

But it's something so simple as establishing a water source that's off stream and keeping them away from the creek.

If we could do this with other farmers and ranchers in the watershed, and even in a larger scale, we could have a huge impact on water quality overall.

- I mean a simple solution to what is a pretty big problem.

Chris, thank you so much for letting us come on your land and take a look.

(gentle music) - One of the things we like to highlight is that, you know, it's something that everybody plays a role in.

You know, we all use water every day.

We all drink water every day.

And we all through our actions, whether it's in an urban setting or a rural setting, influence the quality of that downstream.

You know, when you're thinking about how much fertilizer you're putting on your lawn, where you are, you're dumping your motor oil or where you're washing your car, ultimately that all ends up as storm water and it ends up in a place like the Kansas River.

- I like to look at it from the big bird's eye view right?

So what we do in one area, in a rural setting or an urban setting, all of that makes its way to the water.

- You know, a lot of these changes to make a difference with water quality are incremental right?

And a lot of times it takes kind of a generational change in the farming community for the most part.

When we can kind find kind of a win-win situation where we're funding a project that's gonna help their operation too it's very much an easy sell, but sometimes it's a little more difficult.

- I think as younger generations come about, people are more aware of the issues, they want to learn more about it and they want to do better.

So optimism for the future, I think it looks better than it did, but we still have a long ways to go and a lot of challenges, especially when we're talking about climate change as a whole, and water just being one piece of that.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Share your sustainability story or learn more about sustainability and earth-friendly innovations at MyWorldToo.com.

- Mother nature functioned here for tens of thousands of years until man came and everything functioned just fine.

People were able to survive off the land.

Perenniality is sort of the overarching strategy.

- Heartland Tree Alliance is a program of bridging the gap.

So Heartland Tree Alliance, what we do is we plant trees in the whole metro area.

Mostly public trees and right of way spaces, park trees.

(gentle music)