Impact
We believe that we can use business as a force for good – something we’ve contemplated from the beginning.
Beer as a force for good
For us, good means more than just the quality or the taste of the beer; it reflects how we fulfil our role as the local brewer and encapsulates how we work with the environment and give back to the community.
As a B-Corp certified business, we’re proud to be part of a global movement of businesses working to create positive impact in the world. We use this score as a benchmark to review and improve the way we run our business.
Our Beer as a Force for Good report provides a deeper dive into our approach to sustainability and conscious business.
Sustainability
Since we started, we’ve been committed to treading more lightly on the Earth – after all, this is the only planet with beer!
Our Green Feet program captures this commitment to being a sustainable beer brand. While focussing on energy, water and waste, it also encapsulates how we work with raw materials, supply chains, packaging and transport.
Through Green Feet, we’ve reduced our water and energy consumption rates in line with the most efficient 25% of the world’s independent brewers. In other words, the amount of water and energy it takes to make our environmentally friendly beer is significantly lower than the industry average.
Meanwhile, our bottles and packaging materials are made from 70% and 50% recycled content, respectively, while our crew are bringing our waste-to-landfill rate to close to 5% by separating out 14 different waste streams at the brewery to ensure that they’re being recycled in the best way available.
What’s more, thanks to our treating and recycling water on-site, we brewed our first-ever recycled water beer in March 2020 for World Water Day!
As part of our EPA licence conditions, our Pollution Incident Response Management Plan can be found here.
Community
Being ingrained in the community is an important part of who we are; we feel it’s our responsibility to give back, pay it forward and support the people who support us.
We do this by supporting local fundraisers with beer and merch, sending our team into the community for volunteer days and running our Karma Kegs, where we donate a keg to a partnering venue and direct the money from its sales to a not-for-profit or local initiative.
We also fundraise for local not-for-profit partners through our annual events such as Murwillumbah Open Day, Festival of the Stone and the Backyard Invitational.
As the next step in our community program, and after donating $750,000 to charities between 2013 and 2018, we established our own not-for-profit the inGrained Foundation to continue generating and directing donations to grassroots Northern Rivers charities. Stone & Wood continues to support the inGrained Foundation by donating $1/100L of beer sold.
Our inGrained Foundation also helps us respond to communities experiencing hardship or crisis, such as the 2019-20 Australian bushfires – around this time the inGrained Foundation directed over $36,000 to rural fire services with help from the community.
In 2019, the inGrained Foundation launched its inaugural Northern Rivers Large Grants Program, which offered $60,000 in funding for Northern Rivers not-for-profits with DGR status. In the 2020 Grants Program, we were thrilled to be able to increase the funding pool to $100,000. We look forward to running the Grants Program every year and helping local charities capacity-build for future generations.
