Congratulations to Jane Baker of Mrs Baker’s Still House for being the District 23 Women Taking Climate Action Awardee 2024. Jane is pictured above with her two daughters.
As Jane says:
Our ethos at Mrs Baker’s Still House is that sustainably is the only way to operate. If you are not sustainable, then you are unsustainable; which means you will come to a rapid collapse. Sometimes it is the big things, and many times it is the small every day things. Which is another take on the famous David Ross Brower quote; “Think Globally, Act Locally”.
About us: we create award winning gins, liqueurs and single malt whisky in our micro-distillery located in regional Victoria. Family owned and operated.
The Small things include : taking returns of our bottles, to be cleaned and sterilised and re-used. Sure bottles can be recycled by transporting them to a glass processing centre, grinding the bottles up and heating the glass in a furnace, reforming into new glass. But you can save a lot of energy by re-using the same bottle.
The Small things include: feeding our waste bio matter to the sheep or composting. Waste botanicals from the gin is processed by our worm farm, and the castings used in the gin garden where many of the botanicals are grown. And our waste barley from whisky making is fed to the sheep, they love the extra nutrient so much that during whisky making season if you are pushing a wheel barrow, the sheep will chase you.
The Small things include: making packaging choices. Using paper “bubble” wrap. Using & reusing &reusing our cardboard boxes. Not using vinyl stickers, even though they are so cool. Using bio packing tape, or even better, but definitely more fiddly, is the paper packing tape. Using the Australian invented Great Wrap for pallet wrapping, which they advertise as 100% home compostable – yes I have put it in the compost, and I am testing their claims.
The Small things include: how many times you can use water. In distilling, like most manufacturing, there is quite a lot of waste wash water. All this waste water is captured in our water treatment pond in the orchard, and pumped over (solar pump); and then it trickles into the orchards area. This is the orchards where we grow some of the citrus used in our gin making.
The Big thing is Energy. Our distillery is 100% solar powered. Distillation is very energy hungry, it requires you to heat the kettle of liquid and cool the resulting gas. So you are heating and cooling at the same time, kind of like standing with the door open of the fridge, blasting with a hair dryer. We use 21 kilowatts of electricity on start up of the still, most people’s roof top solar panels produce 5 kilowatts. We generate and store this much electricity, and also feed electricity back into the grid network when we are not distilling.
We can all learn from Jane’s ethos. Congratulations! Find out more about the District 23 Women Taking Climate Action Award here.
