Sustainability

Water Stewardship

Water is one of the three raw materials used to craft Scotch whisky, it is vital. If a distillery fails to have a reliable, year-round supply of H2O, it cannot function. 

Managing our impact on water, and being good stewards of this essential resource, is a business and sustainability priority. 

This includes:

- Using water more efficiently by prioritising the health of our water supplies at each distillery and actively managing production schedules with the usage of  consumptive and nonconsumptive water in mind.

- Driving innovation in our distilling process with, for example, trails of ‘High Gravity Mashing’ which means using a higher ratio of malt to water which allows us to reduce water consumption whilst also driving energy efficiency and importantly ensuring we maintain the character of our spirit.  

- Collaborating with SEPA on water stewardship. This means that when Scotland's environment agency calls on businesses to prepare for possible water shortages, we work in partnership
with them to inform our business decisions and will voluntarily halt production when this is necessary for the environment based on SEPAs advice ahead of any regulatory action.  

Energy Reduction

We recogise the importance of embedding energy efficiency in our culture and working towards using 100% renewable energy, fuel and heat in enabling us to achieve net zero carbon in our operations.

Our business is a clean fuel pioneer, investing in the switch to clean and renewable fuels at all distilleries.

Early investment in green technology means we are now seeing vast improvements in energy efficiency at all distilleries. We will continue to identify he right technologies to support our decarbonisation journey across our sites. By building on our existing programmes, we are committed to only using renewable energy by 2030. Since 2005 we have invested in Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG), Natural Gas and biomass systems across our distilleries and as of 2018, none of our distilleries use heavy fuel oil.

Year on year our distilleries have driven programmes to become more energy efficient, reducing emissions and improving our carbon footprint – with initiatives such as Thermal Vapour Recompression (TVR) and High Gravity Mashing which improve energy efficiency and reduce our use of fossil fuels across our footprint. 

Co-Products

We are developing innovative methods to recycle the co-products of our whisky distillation. Our aim is to reuse all co-products and reduce our water consumption.