More than five years after it set out to reduce waste, MillerCoors announced that its major breweries are now landfill-free.
The company said Wednesday its brewery in Fort Worth, Texas, has achieved that status — it's MillerCoors' eighth and final major brewery that now reuse or recycle nearly 100 percent of the waste they generate. That means no glass, paperboard, plastics or metal waste are sent to landfills. Any remaining nonreusable or recyclable brewery waste is sent to a waste-to-energy facility, which has now become a standard practice across MillerCoors.
"As we continue our journey to brew a sustainable future, maintaining landfill-free operations at all our major breweries will make a significant impact," said Kim Marotta, director of sustainability at MillerCoors.
The environmental initiative began in 2009, when the company set out to reduce brewery waste by 15 percent by 2015.
When the Trenton, Ohio, facility became the first MillerCoors brewery to achieve landfill-free status in 2011, the company set out to apply those best practices to its other breweries, including its largest. That brewery, based in Golden, Colorado, achieved landfill free status in 2013.
"I tell [co-workers] 'when you retire 20 years from now, you'll look back and say, 'Yeah I did that,'" MillerCoors employee Kelly Harris told CNBC at the time. "That's what really motivates people, the pride with it."
MillerCoors isn't stopping with its breweries. The company said it hopes to achieve landfill-free operations at all its major U.S. manufacturing sites by 2020.
Since 2009, the company has reduced waste across the organization by 89 percent, or what it says is the equivalent of keeping more than 9 million pounds of waste out of local landfills.
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