By Intel Reporter  31 October 2025

This week, Global Drinks Intel announces the winners of its 2025 ESG Awards. Here’s a look at why Lion Brewery (Ceylon) won the Waste Reduction Achievement of the Year award.

As Sri Lanka’s leading brewery, with an annual production capacity at its plant in Biyagama of 2m hectolitres, Lion Brewery (Ceylon) brews a range of beers under the Lion, Carlsberg and Guinness master brands, exporting to 17 countries in total.

When fermentation is completed during the brewing process, the liquid undergoes centrifugation followed by filtration – the latter being carried out using a candle filter, incorporating kieselguhr (a fine-grained rock also known as diatomaceous earth) as a filter aid. Normally, the waste kieselguhr would be managed as landfill following the process.

The company addressed this issue through a number of steps, first reducing the amount of filter material used per hectolitre of beer, and then also introducing an increase in filter length.

Secondly, the used filter aid material is discharged from the filter as slurry, which would normally have to be air/sun-dried, requiring space, time and potentially generating odour issues. Lion tackled this by installing a Limburg plate and cloth filter press, discharging the filter medium in cake form in a matter of hours, thus minimising the previous complexities and inefficiencies.

The company also works with Sachindra Holdings, a manufacturer of concrete paving and block stones, using the waste material as a partial replacement for quarry dust, a key ingredient of the stones. They have also identified three key benefits: lower input costs; a higher crushing/load-bearing strength; and a smoother external finish, requiring less plastering.

Lion Brewery was also able to incorporate bricks made from this process into its ‘green warehouse’ model, constituting another step towards driving waste to value and circularity in the company’s operations.

Since then – and following discussions with a local cement manufacturer – the material has cleared laboratory trials and is now undergoing commercial trials for application in ready-mix cement, as a partial replacement for fly ash.

Our judges said: “This project focused on the avoidance of solid waste in liquid streams, finding a commercial outlet for the brewery’s waste in the construction industry – proving that one company’s waste is another’s treasure.”

Read the article >> https://drinks-intel.com/cross-category/global-drinks-intel-esg-awards-2025-waste-reduction-achievement-of-the-year-lion-brewery-ceylon/