BrewDog has admitted half of the saplings planted for their million tree Lost Forest died in the first year.
The Scottish Government agency Scottish Forestry has paid the beer company £690,986 to date for the tree planting project on Kinrara Estate, near Aviemore.
The beer giant set out to plant about one million trees after purchasing the estate in 2020, with claims it will help remove twice as much carbon from the environment as it emits, making the company carbon neutral.
But in a statement this week, BrewDog co-founder James Watt said last summer’s “extreme conditions resulted in a higher-than-expected failure rate, particularly Scots pine”, which is one of the 11 species planted on the estate.
However the alternate take is that it seems to be being enforced well:
A spokesperson for the agency said: “As regulator for forestry in Scotland, we have carried out an inspection last year to the Lost Forest project on the Kinrara Estate. Our inspectors found pockets of high mortality of trees that were planted and we believe the most likely cause of this was the very dry conditions last spring when the trees were put in the ground. “The public funds allocated to the woodland creation project are fully protected. We will expect the applicant [Lost Forest] to make good through replacement planting at their own cost to ensure that the agreed amount of woodland creation, and at the correct tree density, takes place. If we found that this was not the case, then we can reclaim the grant.” BrewDog said it has since replanted 50,000 of the baby trees that did not survive the winter.
Without paywall
