We’re so very proud to share the news and announce that we are the first gin distillery in Australia to achieve carbon neutrality across all our gins bottled onsite (product certification), as well as the entire Four Pillars business (organisation certification).

It was a complex (but very important) process to go through and our team had lots of questions about what it all actually means and how we got here. So chances are a few of you have the same questions. Here’s our best crack at answering them.

First up, what are carbon emissions and what does it mean to be carbon neutral?

In our gin-making world, carbon emissions include electricity, gas, water, raw materials such as raw spirit and botanicals, plus packaging and freight.

And to be certified as carbon neutral, you need to bring all of these emissions down to zero. You achieve this by taking measures to reduce or remove emissions, as well as purchasing offset units to offset the remaining emissions.   

Both our products and our organisation have been certified as being carbon neutral – aka having zero emissions thanks to proactive measures or offsets – by Climate Active.

What’s the difference between product certification and organisation certification?

Product certification is all about our individual bottles of gin. We’ve been working with the teams at Climate Active and Ndevr Environmental for over a year now and they’ve helped us to track every part of our gin-making process and the emissions that come with it.

This includes what goes into our gin, to how it is made, and to where it goes beyond the distillery door, and we can happily say that every bottle of gin we make at our distillery is certified carbon neutral.

Organisation certification is awarded to businesses who reduce and/or offset emissions. And we have been awarded this certification thanks to our partnership with Lion who achieved certification in 2020 and do a lot of fantastic work in taking measures to reduce and offset emissions.

What are we doing to reduce our day-to-day emissions?

Sustainability has always been a big focus of ours and never more so than with our design and build of Healesville 2.0. Here are some of the exciting new things we have going on:

• Our new site runs on 100% renewable electricity, and we’ve increased our solar system with plans to increase this even more in the future
• We’ve used recycled and upcycled concrete and bricks for the build of the new space
• We’ve planted local natives and botanicals, some of which will be used in gin distillations
• Gin will be piped directly into the main bar through copper pipes so we’re not using an unnecessary amount of glass. Our tonic will also go into kegs and these two initiatives are going to saved 29 tonnes of glass per year
• Our whole Healesville Distillery will be enclosed by a copper ‘veil’ which will work as a natural heat exchange to reduce energy consumption. In summary, the extremely hot and unusable water from our distillations will travel through the tubing of the copper veil to cool it down so it can be re-used

Go well,
Cam, Stu, Matt and the Four Pillars team