Food and drink, the fuel that keeps negotiators negotiating and reporters reporting, always gets a lot of attention at climate summits.
At this year’s meeting, the Australian delegation is a favorite for its complimentary coffee. Another popular spot is the Azerbaijani pavilion, where the hosts are serving strong tea from gleaming silver samovars.
And then there are the Singaporeans. They’re giving out free beer made from recycled toilet water.
Delegates and observers at the talks, held in a retrofitted soccer stadium on the edge of Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, don’t seem to mind. In fact, the beer’s recycling credentials might add to its appeal among the environmentally minded at this summit, known as COP29.
“At first their eyes widen,” said Samantha Thian, one of the leaders of Singapore’s youth delegation in Baku. “Then we reassure them. They’re usually coming back the next day for another.”
A hoppy pilsner called NEWBrew that comes in pastel cans decorated with solar panels, rain clouds and cityscapes, the beer is part of a collaboration between a Singaporean company called Brewerkz and the country’s national water agency. The project is designed to draw attention to, and normalize, Singapore’s water reclamation efforts.
An island country at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore has no major natural freshwater sources of its own. It collects rainfall, imports water from its northern neighbor, Malaysia, removes salt from seawater, and uses filtration systems and ultraviolet light to make wastewater drinkable again.
Brewerkz has been producing limited-run beers using such reclaimed water since 2018, mostly for conferences and trade shows, as a kind of festive ambassador for the water-recycling cause.
“I’ll admit it’s a bit of a gimmick, but these things do work,” Ong Tze-Ch’in, chief executive of Singapore’s national water agency, said in an interview.
Ensuring there is enough clean water for people to drink, grow crops and keep industries like computer-chip fabrication running is a key challenge as global warming worsens water scarcity around the world.
Already, roughly half of the population of the world struggles to secure enough clean water for at least part of the year, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body. And every degree of temperature increase raises the risk of droughts and floods.
As word of the so-called sewage beer got around, some conference attendees stopped by the Singaporean pavilion for a curious taste.
Others, like Pat Heslop-Harrison, a professor of biology at the University of Leicester in England, just wanted a drink that didn’t involve trekking out of the stadium. It was only after he’d cracked open a can, Dr. Heslop-Harrison said, that he realized he was drinking a cold one made from recycled sewage water.
And Ms. Thian was right. He liked it so much that he came back the next day.
“I’m sure that the technology of Singapore is such that it’s second to none,” he said.
Some patrons were more sheepish about trying the beer. One taster was glad to share his review — “fresh” and “not so bitter” — but not his name, lest his boss discover he’d been day-drinking at a U.N. summit meeting.
Another, Julián Reingold, an Athens-based journalist, stopped by for a swig as the negotiations seemed to bog down in their second week.
“If we were to drink more of that beer, I don’t know how the negotiations would turn out,” Mr. Reingold said. “Maybe better. Who knows?”
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