DB Export’s beer bottle sand was combined with recycled ink toner cartridges to make an aggregate for resurfacing the 40,000sqm Queenstown Airport apron, the first project of its kind.
The beer bottle sand machine crushes empty bottles and uses two vacuums to remove labels and silica — one 330ml bottle makes about 200g of sand.
DB Breweries senior marketing manager Tony Wheeler said the company started its sustainable push with ‘‘Brewtroleum’’, in which leftover yeast slurry was turned into a biofuel, supplied to Gull and used to create the 98-octane biofuel petrol.
‘‘People really got engaged with that and we were looking at all the different things we were doing and ways that we could help.
‘‘We found that there’s a big issue around sand.’’
Mr Wheeler said sand was not a sustainable resource and more beaches were being depleted as demand grew.
‘‘There were even some beaches in New Zealand where they were taking the sand off one beach and putting it on another beach, which seemed crazy to us.’’
The company looked at how it could reduce New Zealand’s dependency on beach-derived sand and simultaneously increase the recycling rate.
Until recently about 10,000 tonnes of glass at Visy Recycling in Auckland could not be recycled, so, rather than have it diverted to landfill, it now goes into the industrial beer bottle sand machine.
It could process any glass and the resulting sand is now used by Downer in roading and resurfacing projects, and Drymix, which has created a ‘‘super easy eco concrete’’, available through Mitre10.
‘‘This stuff, there’s still use for it, it’s not rubbish and there’s no reason it should be ending up in landfill,’’ Mr Wheeler said.
‘‘We can still use it for something else.
‘‘For us a big thing is about collaboration and figuring out how we can work with other like-minded businesses to find solutions and to reuse our resources.’’
