(Yicai) Dec. 12 -- Budweiser Brewing Company APAC, Asia's largest brewer, is looking for new partners at the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP28, to achieve its 2025 sustainability goals and net zero ambition across value chain by 2040, according to its Vice President of Sustainability and Procurement.

"We're here because sustainability is truly important for us as it's part of our business, not just what we do sometimes," Jan Clysner told Yicai on the sidelines of the ongoing conference in Dubai. "It's an opportunity to show our practices, and it's also a big opportunity for us to learn from others, to engage with other companies and non-governmental organizations to develop new partnerships, which will allow us to even go faster on our sustainability journey than what we have done so far."

Global beer giant Anheuser-Busch InBev, the parent company of Budweiser APAC, set its 2025 sustainable goals in 2018, aiming to reduce carbon dioxide emissions throughout its value chain by 25 percent by 2025. At the end of 2021, it announced its ambition to achieve net zero across its value chain by 2040.

Budweiser APAC has carbon-neutral breweries in China's Wuhan and Jinzhou as of the end of last year, Clysner noted. Four of its breweries in the country entirely use renewable electricity, while 17 of its breweries across the Asia-Pacific region have installed solar panels, with most located in China, he added.

Another key initiative of Budweiser APAC to achieve its 2025 sustainable goals in China is promoting local barley cultivation. It bought 60,000 tons of Chinese barley this year, up 50 percent from a year earlier, and will sow 80,000 tons of barley, the company announced in June.

Budweiser APAC cooperates with Jiangsu Nongken Group, a Chinese agricultural company, to rapidly increase its barley planting scale and is planning to introduce new barley varieties to further boost the yield, Clysner pointed out.

Budweiser APAC is also working with innovative start-ups to explore more opportunities for sustainable development. It joined hands with Chinese startup Vegatex to make plant-based leather from spent grain, a brewery by-product, to replace genuine and other artificial leather to realize the high-value utilization of waste.

"Zero waste, that's our philosophy," Clysner noted. "This example with Vegatex helps us to cover part of our spent grains to turn into a raw material for a very new material in a very new industry," he added. "I truly hope that they can make it hit the quality level that the car industry needs."

The United Nations Climate Change Conference, which started on Nov. 30 and ends today, is an annual conference and the world's only multilateral decision-making forum on climate change, with almost complete membership of every country globally, according to its website.