How Carver Brewing Achieved Carbon Neutrality (and You Can Too)
Practical strategies to boost your sustainability efforts
Carver Brewing in Durango has been walking the sustainability talk for years, transitioning to renewable energy nearly two decades ago. Their sustainability efforts are certified at the highest level by the Colorado Green Business Network and they recently earned a prestigious award recognizing their work. But when a customer flagged their use of disposable salsa ramekins, co-owner Claire Carver was reminded that there’s always room for improvement.
A recent global survey from the UN-backed SME Climate Hub found that 79% of small business owners were increasingly motivated to reduce their environmental impact because it’s “the right thing to do.” Additional reasons include attracting new customers, gaining a competitive advantage and increasing their resilience to the impacts of climate change.
So, how to get started? We caught up with Claire at West Slope Startup Week to hear how Carver Brewing not only reached carbon neutrality, but also turned sustainability into a smart business strategy.
In this guide, we’ll break down how they did it, and share simple, actionable ways your business can start its own path toward sustainability.
But first, a little Colorado history…
In 1986, the Carver brothers moved to Durango, where they opened a German-inspired bakery on Main Ave. Two years later, Jim and Bill found a more profitable use for the same ingredients and transformed Carver’s into the state’s second brewpub since prohibition. The brothers designed the brewery with energy efficiency in mind, installing features like a closed-loop water system.
In 2007, they switched to 100% wind powered energy—Durango’s first restaurant and brewery to do so—and a year later they installed a 16 panel, rooftop solar array and the city’s largest solar hot water system at the time.
“That in particular, was impactful as a brewery because of the amount of hot water that was used,” Claire said, adding that “just the return on investments, as far as the financial cost of heating all that water, it made sense.”
Fast forward to 2021. Bill’s kids, Claire and her brother Colin, decided to buy into the family business as he and Jim approached retirement. Claire, who earned her Masters degree in Greenhouse Gas Management and Accounting, had previously been working on Bank of America’s net neutrality program. Upon taking over the business, she saw a chance to take Carver’s sustainability efforts to the next level.
Step 1: Conduct a sustainability assessment
Whether you’re just launching or you’re a local institution like Carver’s, the first step is to understand your current impact. Take a close look at your operations and assess how your business affects the environment. This process is not dissimilar to conducting a climate risk assessment, and the two can complement each other.
What to do:
Identify your impacts by understanding how your business interacts with the environment through energy use, water consumption, waste generation, raw material sourcing, and transportation.
Gather as much information as possible about your operations. Key data points might include energy and water usage, waste volumes, materials sourcing, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Review your existing policies and procedures to see how well they align with your sustainability goals. This will help you pinpoint where adjustments are needed.
Identify what’s working! Recognizing what’s already effective helps build momentum and reinforces a culture of continuous improvement.
The first thing Claire did was calculate the brewpub’s GHG emissions.
“A simple greenhouse gas inventory is revealing of where your emissions are and where your focus should be,” Claire said.
There are a number of tools you can use. Claire uses the Simplified GHG Emissions Calculator from the EPA.
“Some of our largest sources of emissions are on-site gas usage and also electricity, which is really common across any household or business,” Claire said.
While that wasn’t exactly a surprise—and gas usage remains a challenge—Claire did realize that the restaurant could make significant gains by improving its food and malt sourcing, as well as cut down on waste. These observations inspired a series of operational changes; many of which were small and simple, but generated a surprisingly big impact.
Step 2: Build a sustainability roadmap for your business
Chances are, you’ve uncovered plenty of opportunities to make your business more sustainable. Maybe even… too many. Claire’s advice? Start small. Pick one item from your list, and do that.
“I think a lot of these things seem perhaps intimidating to implement,” Claire said. “But then once you do them, you realize how easy and well received they can be.”
It’s okay to start with the lowest hanging fruit. If electricity consumption is a big data point for you, try switching to energy efficient LED lightbulbs or installing timers or motion detectors on lights in less frequented areas.
If employee transportation (via car or air travel) is your Achille’s heel, look for ways to incentivise bike commuting and public transportation if it’s available in your community. You could also hold more virtual meetings and reserve in-person trips for essential purposes. (Check out Startup Colorado’s tips on managing a remote team.)
Claire began by focusing on the areas she could control that offered the greatest impact. For Carver’s, that meant tackling waste generation. The brewery partnered with local composting company Table to Farm to collect food waste from both the kitchen and dining areas. In 2024, they diverted more than 25,000 pounds of food waste from the landfill, preventing roughly 1,360 kilograms of CO₂ emissions.
Her initial assessment also uncovered some surprisingly simple opportunities to cut both costs and waste, starting with their produce suppliers.
“We were throwing so much of the exterior lettuce away, as it was just coming in beat up,” Claire said.
By realizing that nearly 30% of their lettuce was ending up in the trash, the Carver’s team decided to switch suppliers. The change immediately paid off, with the new lettuce yielding about 30% more usable product. Tomatoes told a similar story. Primarily used as slices on burgers, the team had been tossing out the ends. Now, instead of going to waste, those scraps are transformed into a house-made pico de gallo salsa.
And those single-use ramekins? Those were replaced with an edible bed of lettuce.
Step 3: Lean into partnerships
Building strong sustainability partnerships across your value chain can do more than improve operations or boost revenue. The right collaborations can spark innovation, open new business opportunities, and strengthen your brand’s public image.
Successful partnerships share a few key traits:
A clear, shared purpose and understanding of each business’s value chain and environmental impacts
Alignment with each partner’s core strengths and interests
Strong governance and accountability, paired with the flexibility to adapt and refine strategies as needed
If you’re not sure where to begin, start locally. Connect with community leaders, peer businesses or organizations that are also exploring sustainability initiatives.
For Carver Brewing, partnerships have been integral to their success. In addition to working with Table to Farm on composting, they’ve engaged with Durango’s Green Business Roundtable and the Colorado Green Business Network.
Supply chain emissions are often a significant percentage of a company’s overall carbon footprint. At Carver’s, the brewing team has long worked with regional growers, which can help lower emissions by reducing transportation distances.
In 2024, they learned that their long-time supplier, Proximity Malt in Monte Vista, Colorado, was offering a malt made from locally grown grains using regenerative farming practices. Paired with hops from Billy Goat Hop Farm, a Montrose grower committed to climate-friendly methods, they produced a first-of-its-kind West Slope IPA, called ReGen Ale. It went on to earn the Innovation Spotlight Award from the Colorado Green Business Network.
“It seems like everyone got amplified with that partnership,” Claire said. She added, “The exciting part of this project was celebrating the world-class agriculture products we have here locally.”
Share, Learn, and Iterate
Reducing your carbon footprint isn’t just good for people and the planet; it also gives businesses a competitive edge. Reports from McKinsey, Harvard Business School, and others show that sustainability and climate resilience can drive stronger performance across industries.
As your business begins to make progress, share your journey with peers, employees, and customers. Open communication not only helps build credibility and inspire others, but can also spark new partnerships and deepen buy-in from your team and community.
According to the aforementioned survey by the SME Climate Hub, business owners who took action to reduce their carbon footprint reported tangible benefits: 55% saw an improved business reputation, 43% differentiated themselves from competitors, and 39% met customer expectations and retained business.
For Claire, the business advantages of sustainability are only one part of the equation.
“It’s not just always a pure cost analysis for us,” she said. “It’s more about what we need to do to be good stewards.”
Additional Resources
More Founder Stories on Sustainability
This newsletter is powered by Startup Colorado. We believe that anyone should have the ability to start and scale a business in the place they call home. And in Rural Colorado, we’re seeing the power of entrepreneurship transform communities and lives, proving that the spark of innovation can—and should—be kindled outside urban hubs.
Written by Margaret Hedderman, Director of Content & Brand Strategy at Startup Colorado, with support from Claire Carver.