Beer Waste Used To Make Soap
An environmentally-friendly soap detergent has been made using alcohol left over during the beer making process, reports Reuters.
This development of suds with a kick wasn’t driven by a desire to make dish washing more fun, but was rather a product of a company wanting to make a profit over something it wasn’t using.
Anheuser-Busch InBev has experienced demand for larger-style beer without the alcohol. So, when alcohol was inevitably created during the process of brewing this beer, the company was left with a whole lot of useless remains. Or so it thought.
Eventually, Anheuser-Busch reached an agreement to sell the alcohol to Belgium-based green cleaning company Ecover, which now uses the residual product as an active cleaning and preservative ingredient in its dish soap, aptly named “Too Good to Waste.”
Jan/san distributors are not yet selling boozy cleaners and disinfectants, but who knows, maybe janitors will someday be cleaning with alcoholic soap. And, maybe, in an ironic twist, the cleaning staff will be using the detergents in bars and breweries.
Unused soap can be been recycled, too. Diversey’s “Soap for Hope” program commissions hotels and motels to donate unused portions of soap collected from guest rooms, which are then shipped to low-income communities, which can recycle the remains into new soap bars.