Company: LION

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Welcome to our series aimed at spotlighting the individual leaders within BIER member companies and stakeholder organizations. Learn how these practitioners and their companies are addressing pressing challenges around water, energy, agriculture, and climate change, and what inspires each of them to advance environmental sustainability in the beverage sector and collectively, overall.

Briefly describe your role and responsibilities and how long you have worked with your company.

My current role is Group Sustainability Director for LION. LION operates primarily in Australia, but we are also the largest brewer in New Zealand. In addition, we have a significant craft beer presence in the United States, including New Belgium Brewery and Bell’s Brewery. Our US craft beer network spans four operational sites: Bell’s Brewery in Michigan; New Belgium’s breweries in Fort Collins, Colorado; Asheville, North Carolina; and our newest site in Daleville, Virginia. Beyond brewing, we also operate wineries on the west coast and New Zealand.

I’ve been with LION for around six and a half years. I initially joined as Environment Director, and after three years, I transitioned into the Sustainability Director role. My responsibilities now focus on leading LION’s overall sustainability strategy, which we divide into three pillars—Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)—to maintain clarity and focus. My role is to set the strategy across these pillars and ensure its successful implementation.

Before joining LION, I worked across a range of carbon intensive industries, including aviation, chemicals, steel, and aluminum. This diverse background has been invaluable in bringing a fresh perspective to challenges such as decarbonization, water stewardship, and advancing the circular economy within the brewing industry.

I’m a chemical engineer by background, and the first half of my career was centered on engineering and management roles. My first dedicated sustainability role was at Qantas, where I worked for six years before joining LION.

How has the company’s sustainability program evolved over the years, and what are your specific priorities for 2025?

When I first joined, our sustainability strategy was organized into distinct areas of focus. On the environmental side, it centered around four key pillars: carbon, water, packaging (within the broader circular economy), and environmental risk management. Socially, our priorities included responsible consumption—our most material issue as an alcohol producer—along with community investment and reconciliation work with Australia’s First Nations people. We’ve also focused on broader human rights initiatives, which naturally tie into responsible sourcing. Governance underpins all of this, with a growing emphasis on climate reporting, risk management, and policy development, particularly as new disclosure requirements emerge globally.

Most recently, we’ve made significant progress. For example, on carbon, we have science-based targets cascaded from our parent company, Kirin, in Japan. In Australia, we’ve already exceeded our 2030 Scope 1 and 2 targets, achieving a 70% reduction against our 2019 baseline. This success is largely due to investments in renewable electricity, including agreements to supply 100% renewable power to our Australian operations. In New Zealand, we have a credible pathway to meet our 2030 target of a 55% reduction, but the U.S. presents more challenges. Access to renewable energy agreements there is more complex, so identifying opportunities to secure wind and solar power for our U.S. breweries will be a major focus over the next few years.

On water stewardship, we’re on track to achieve a 2.4L/L water efficiency target at our large breweries in water-stressed regions—Brisbane, Sydney, and Launceston—by next year. This has been enabled by the installation of a new reverse osmosis water recycling plant at Tooheys in Sydney that matches our water recycling operations at XXXX Brewery in Brisbane.

For packaging, we’re making strong progress in increasing recycled content. On average, our packaging contained over 70% recycled material last year. Some of our glass bottles have exceeded 80% recycled content, and aluminum cans exceed 50%. Working closely with our suppliers, we’re continuing to reduce demand for virgin materials and the carbon intensity of packaging. For instance, using recycled glass reduces energy consumption in glass furnaces, especially when combined with innovations like oxygen injection and cullet pre-heating, which has the potential halve furnace energy use.

Looking ahead to 2025, we’re shifting focus from discrete efforts on carbon, water, and circular economy to integrated projects that deliver impact across multiple pillars simultaneously. To truly accelerate progress, we need to move beyond individual efforts and start collaborating more deeply across the value chain.

Our suppliers make up roughly 80% of a beer’s carbon footprint, so working collectively with them is essential. A great example is the Australian Climate Leaders Coalition’s Scope 3 Roadmap project, where we brought key players together—packaging suppliers, maltsters, logistics providers, and customers. Instead of relying on generic database figures, we gathered real carbon emissions data directly from our partners. It wasn’t easy—there is a natural reluctance to share sensitive data—but we addressed concerns by aggregating where needed and building trust.

With accurate data, we could have meaningful discussions about emissions reductions—whether that’s increasing recycled content in packaging, using electric trucks, or working with farmers on regenerative agriculture. This project demonstrated the power of collaboration and the need to take the blinkers off. Too often, companies pursue the same targets independently, missing opportunities to work together.

In 2025, we’ll focus on fostering more of these “pre-competitive” collaborations, where competitors and partners align on shared challenges. There’s precedent for this—like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil—where companies worked together to address deforestation. We’re out of time, and we can’t afford to tackle these issues alone. Guardrails are needed to ensure compliance with competition laws, but these non-competitive conversations are critical to accelerating change.

A great example of this approach is the work we’re exploring to support the resilience of the Great Barrier Reef. Projects like this demonstrate how we can simultaneously address nature conservation and sustainability challenges across the value chain.

Ultimately, I find this deeply exciting. There’s so much potential when we work together. The limits of going it alone are now clear, but when we take collective action, we can make a much bigger impact on the climate, circularity, and beyond.

How do you feel being a BIER member will help you successfully address the key areas you are addressing in 2025?

Initially, the appeal of BIER membership was the benchmarking data. With such a wide, truly global membership base, accessing that data was invaluable. My first interaction with BIER was centered around using this benchmarking information to understand where we stood. As you can tell, we’ve been working to build strong sustainability leadership credentials—both as a company and as part of Kirin, which aims to be a global sustainability leader.

A critical first step in demonstrating leadership is understanding how your current performance compares to peers. Benchmarking allows us to identify opportunities to strengthen our leadership position—or, as I like to say, to role model that leadership. It provides a blueprint for other brewers to follow, whether that’s in decarbonization, water stewardship, or building an effective circular economy. For us, the benchmarking data was key to understanding where we were positioned and identifying the steps needed to genuinely achieve and articulate sustainability leadership.

Another significant benefit I’ve seen—particularly through our work with New Belgium—is the emission factor development for Scope 3 models. When we acquired New Belgium in 2019, I requested a copy of their Scope 3 model and quickly noticed many references to BIER’s emission factors. That was a lightbulb moment. It reinforced the critical role that an industry group like BIER plays in developing standardized factors to ensure a common basis for comparison across performance metrics.

For me, those two elements—benchmarking data and the development of standardized emission factors—are the standout highlights of BIER membership.

Name one of the practical solutions or best practices you learned in working with BIER and its members and why it was important to you and/ or your company.

I would bring it back to the Scope 3 model and the use of standardized emission factors. While some factors may have been a bit dated, their real value came from providing an agreed-upon benchmark that the industry could use for consistent comparison.

Through our work with the Climate Leaders Coalition in Australia, we quickly realized there are countless ways to measure Scope 3 emissions—each with its advantages and flaws. But what’s most important is deciding on one methodology and moving forward. Otherwise, you end up stuck, endlessly debating the “best” approach. In that project, we recognized that while the chosen methodology wasn’t perfect, it was “good enough” to establish a baseline number and then shift focus to the real task: reducing that number.

A phrase we often use is “progress over perfection.” It’s about ensuring we don’t get bogged down in details or competing interests. There are so many ways to calculate Scope 3 emissions, and while accuracy matters, the ultimate goal isn’t the number itself—it’s what you do with it.

This is where industry groups like BIER play such a critical role. They have the opportunity to set standards and communicate a clear message—that perfection isn’t the goal, progress is. Even if the emission factors aren’t flawless, using consistent data across the industry creates a common basis for comparison and allows us to focus on what truly matters: meaningful action.

This is especially relevant now with the rise of new climate disclosures. They’re alive in California, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand—all key markets for us. These disclosures are a positive step forward, offering investors and regulators the apples-to-apples comparisons they’ve been asking for. But we mustn’t lose sight of the bigger picture: reporting is only the starting point. Looking in the mirror is important, but once you see the reality, the question becomes—how do you act on it?

Another key point is ensuring carbon emissions data isn’t reduced to a transaction. When handled purely as a compliance exercise—just numbers, decimals, and boxes to tick—it risks losing its transformative potential. Accurate data should be the beginning of a conversation, not the end. And this is where sustainability leaders have a role to play: keeping the conversation alive and ensuring the data drives meaningful change along the value chain.

That’s the paradigm shift businesses need. Sustainability reporting is increasingly driven by finance and accounting teams—as it is in Australia, where the disclosures come from the Accounting Standards Board. On one hand, it’s a win to have finance professionals “inside the tent.” But on the other, we need to help them see sustainability as more than a transaction or compliance exercise. It’s about collaboration and action.

Take flint glass as an example. Clear glass emissions can be reduced significantly by increasing recycled content, but adding more recycled material can make the glass appear slightly cloudy. If the industry collectively agreed to prioritize emissions reductions and accept a more relaxed color specification, we could unlock immediate carbon savings. But this doesn’t work if one company—maybe driven by marketing concerns—pushes back. It’s a perfect example of why industry alignment is so critical.

In the end, we need to act faster, and the only way to do that is through collaboration. Whether it’s decarbonizing processes, agreeing on shared standards, or working across the value chain, progress happens when we shift from compliance-driven transactions to impactful, solutions-driven conversations.

Share a recent accomplishment of your company’s sustainability initiatives/achievements you are most proud of and why.

We’ve built up a strong “menu” of sustainability achievements, which I’m particularly proud of. For instance, there’s the XXXX Tropical Lager, a terrific collaboration with a key customer that also has a strong focus on nature impact, in what happens to be a natural wonder of the world – The Great Barrier Reef. Another recent highlight is the reverse osmosis plant we commissioned this year at Tooheys, which will bring us to near-world-class water efficiency.

We also achieved carbon-neutral organization status, which is important to highlight. While we do use carbon offsets, we don’t rely on them as an excuse to slow down our decarbonization efforts. The 70% carbon reduction we’ve achieved in Australia demonstrates that commitment—offsets are just one lever we use, not the only one. That’s a good example of how offsets can be used correctly, avoiding the polarizing debates that sometimes surround them.

Another significant accomplishment is our 100% renewable electricity sourcing across operations in Australia and New Zealand. In New South Wales, we extended the impact of our renewable electricity agreement by signing up over 230 pubs and clubs to the same deal. This was possible because of our scale: while these smaller venues didn’t have the energy load or demand to justify such an agreement on their own, LION’s cornerstone load created the foundation needed to make it work.

This is what we call an industry-aggregated power purchase agreement, and it’s a win-win. It allowed those pubs and clubs to access renewable electricity through a long-term, 10-year agreement—something quite unusual when most businesses are used to re-evaluating electricity contracts annually. Admittedly, the primary driver for the pubs and clubs was financial rather than environmental, but we were happy to enable a solution that delivered both outcomes.

The modeling we put together showed clear long-term financial benefits, and so while the environmental impact wasn’t the main motivator, it’s something we take pride in quietly achieving. I think there’s a broader takeaway here for sustainability leaders: we often need to improve on the storytelling component of our work.

Many of us come from science or engineering backgrounds—strong with the numbers and focused on building authentic, measurable progress. But we need to get better at sharing these stories in ways that resonate with customers and consumers. Products with legitimate sustainability credentials deserve to stand out, and telling those stories effectively can help drive even greater impact.

If you had one superpower that could be used to radically accelerate and scale sustainable best practices, which one would it be, and how would you use it?

I lingered on this question for a while, but it ties back to what I’ve mentioned before. I think I would wish for a superpower of communication. The ability to clearly and effectively share a message with the world about the impact we’ve had on the planet over the past 300 years. I’d want to tell that story truthfully, authentically, and in a way that motivates action.

There’s so much misinformation and disinformation out there today, particularly amplified by social media and its tribalism, which is all too familiar. This makes it difficult to reach any rational agreement on what we’ve done, what we’re facing, and how we’re going to fix it. My superpower would be to cut through all that noise—to deliver a source of truth that inspires people to act – because the stakes are high. We’re losing opportunities as species disappear and pollution continues to escalate.

If you think about the Anthropocene—this new geological era that humans have essentially created—it’s staggering. Imagine a geologist 10,000 years from now examining evidence of our time: plastic pollution in the Arctic, radiation in the South Pacific from nuclear testing, or forever chemicals like PFAS in lakes and waterways. These alien compounds—products of human ingenuity—are now everywhere.

For 4 billion years, Earth was run by nature. That’s no longer the case. Humans run the planet now, and our impact is undeniable. Technology, while incredible, has accelerated us too quickly down the wrong path.

But here’s the thing: we already have the technology to solve climate change. We have the scientific understanding to address these challenges and quantify the risks. Yet, when I hear about core samples revealing microplastics in lakes or polar bears ingesting synthetic materials, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed.

That’s why, if I could, I’d use my super communication power to make the truth impossible to ignore. To inspire a collective realization of what we’ve done—and what we still have the chance to save.

BIER Publications referenced in this interview:
2023 Water and Energy Use Benchmarking Study