Our thinking

Single malt hydrogen

12 January, 2024

Upcycling is pretty high up on the list of sustainability things that get us excited at Good Business. So this week we were intrigued to read about efforts to transform wastewater from distilleries into an input for green hydrogen generation.  

The premise is simple: to create green hydrogen, you need renewable electricity and fresh water; to manufacture whisky, you inevitably create wastewater. Now, researchers in Scotland have developed a material that when added to distillery wastewater, will allow it to serve as an input into the green hydrogen production process.  

These kinds of advancements may seem like no more than a niche news story. And that’s a fair challenge – solutions must be replicable, scalable, and profitable before they can begin to have widespread impact. But they must also start somewhere. And this kind of innovation – which seeks to transform outputs from one industry to inputs for another – is exactly the kind of collaboration we have previously spoken about as necessary for achieving the systems change that is needed for net zero.  

So, while it may be still some time before we can enjoy a pairing of whisky and green hydrogen, we’ll happily raise a glass to businesses taking the first step to more sustainable value chains. 

By Louise Podmore