We just celebrated Earth Day. A fitting time to talk why we do what we do.
Marble Distilling Co. in Carbondale, Colorado, is widely recognized as the most sustainable distillery on the planet — having achieved net zero status in 2015, the very year it opened its doors, and operating with a proprietary closed-loop Water Energy Thermal System (WETS) that recaptures 100% of all process water and energy. The numbers behind that claim are staggering: more than 4 million gallons of water saved every single year, 1.8 billion BTUs of energy harvested annually, and a water-use ratio of just 1:1 — compared to an industry norm that can reach 100:1. This is not a greenwashing story. This is a distillery that was architected, beam by beam and barrel by barrel, around a single uncompromising ethos: Best Taste. Zero Waste.
But what does it actually take to earn that title — and why does it matter?
The Real Environmental Cost of Conventional Distilling
Before you can appreciate how far Marble has pushed the bar, it helps to understand exactly how resource-hungry conventional distilling really is. Most people picture a distillery as a romantic, rustic operation — copper stills gleaming in firelight, oak barrels aging quietly in stone cellars. The reality of the industry’s environmental footprint is considerably less idyllic.
Distilling is, at its core, a water and energy-intensive manufacturing process. Enormous volumes of water are required not just as an ingredient in the spirit itself, but for cooling condensers, cleaning equipment, managing fermentation temperatures, and dozens of other operational functions. When you tally it all up, a conventional distillery can consume up to 100 bottles of water for every single bottle of vodka it produces. Read that again. One hundred bottles in. One bottle out. That’s not a typo — that’s the industry standard, and it’s a standard that carries enormous consequences in a world where freshwater is increasingly precious.
Crystal River, Colorado
Energy consumption tells a similarly sobering story. Distillation requires sustained, intense heat. Cooling requires sustained refrigeration. Running a full-scale distillery around the clock means pulling significant power from the grid — power that, in most cases, is still generated by fossil fuels. And when you layer in the carbon cost of sourcing ingredients from distant suppliers, the packaging and transportation of finished goods, and the waste generated by spent grain and process byproducts, the environmental ledger of a typical spirits operation runs deeply in the red.
This is precisely why the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS) has increasingly pushed sustainability standards across the sector. The industry is waking up — but waking up slowly. Many brands now use terms like “eco-friendly” or “green” in their marketing, attaching them to initiatives as modest as recycled bottle labels or a single solar panel on the roof. True sustainability is something far more rigorous: it’s verified through measurable systems, auditable data, third-party recognition, and a commitment that permeates every layer of an operation.
What does a genuinely green distillery look like? It means reusing water across the entire production cycle. It means capturing the energy released during distillation and redirecting it back into the facility. It means sourcing ingredients locally to shrink the supply chain’s carbon shadow. It means finding a productive second life for every byproduct — spent grain, waste heat, even the water used to chill condensers. And it means measuring all of it, reporting all of it, and improving all of it year over year.
The concept of “net zero” in distilling is particularly rare. Achieving net zero means that a distillery’s total greenhouse gas emissions are balanced — or better, negated — by the energy it captures, generates, or avoids. In 2015, when most craft distilleries were still figuring out their barrel char levels, Marble Distilling achieved net zero from day one. That’s not an incremental improvement on the status quo. That’s a complete reimagining of what a distillery can be.
As Pina Wine & Spirits notes in its overview of eco-friendly practices shaping the spirits industry, the movement toward truly sustainable distilling is growing — but pioneers who built sustainability into the foundation of their operation, rather than bolting it on as an afterthought, remain exceptionally rare.
With that context in mind, let’s look at how Marble Distilling was designed from the very beginning to rewrite those rules.
How Marble Distilling Was Built to Be Green From Day One
Every great distillery starts with a vision. Most visions center on flavor — on the perfect mash bill, the ideal barrel toast, the right climate for aging. When Connie Baker and Carey Shanks set out to build Marble Distilling Co. in Carbondale, Colorado, their vision was bigger than the bottle. It was about proving that world-class spirits and world-class environmental stewardship weren’t in tension. They were, in fact, inseparable.
Carbondale is not an accidental choice of home. Nestled in the Roaring Fork Valley, in the shadow of Mount Sopris and fed by the pure, glacially-fed waters of the Crystal River, Carbondale is a community that has always understood the relationship between human thriving and environmental care. It’s a mountain town where outdoor culture isn’t a hobby — it’s a way of life. Where the land isn’t a backdrop — it’s a neighbor. Building a distillery here meant building it in dialogue with the landscape, not in opposition to it.
“Massive change can be made in the Spirit Industry when it comes to sustainability — and we want to help catalyze that change.” — Marble Distilling Co.
The distillery’s very name reaches deep into the geology of the place. It’s named after the nearby town of Marble, Colorado, and its spirits are filtered through crushed Yule Creek marble — the same extraordinary white marble quarried from the Yule Creek Valley that was used to build the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. There’s a poetic weight to that connection: a monument built to endure, and a spirit crafted with the same material, filtered to the same standard of purity.
From the moment Marble opened in 2015, sustainability wasn’t a phase two consideration — it was the blueprint. The facility itself was designed from the ground up to integrate passive solar architecture, water recapture systems, and energy reuse technology. The founders made a decision early on that set Marble apart from virtually every other distillery on the planet: they chose to make their entire sustainability model open-source. Every system diagram, every data point, every lesson learned is available for other distilleries to study and adapt. In an industry where proprietary recipes are guarded like state secrets, Marble chose radical transparency. Not because it was good marketing — though it is — but because the mission was always larger than market share.
That mission earned landmark recognition in December 2021, when Connie Baker was appointed as the first-ever craft distiller representative on the DISCUS Environmental Sustainability Committee. It was a historic moment — a signal from the industry’s most powerful trade organization that the model Marble had been quietly perfecting since 2015 was worth putting at the center of the industry’s future. In 2022, both Connie Baker and Carey Shanks were named to the newly formed DISCUS Craft Distiller Sustainability Taskforce, giving Marble a direct hand in shaping the sustainability standards that craft distillers across the country will follow for years to come.
The distillery operates on three core tenets — Spirits | Sustainability | Service — and all three are lived, not just listed on a website. Marble is family and friends-owned and operated. There’s no faceless corporate parent quietly overriding environmental commitments for margin improvement. Every hand that touches a bottle, every decision about sourcing, every upgrade to the water system is made by people who are deeply, personally invested in the outcome.
You can read more about the founders and their vision at Marble’s about page, but the short version is this: Marble Distilling was built green because its founders couldn’t imagine building it any other way.
Building a sustainable vision is one thing — executing it at scale, every single day, is another. Here’s exactly how Marble does it.
Inside the WETS System: Where Sustainability Meets Engineering
The technical heart of Marble Distilling’s sustainability story is the Water Energy Thermal System — WETS — a proprietary, closed-loop engineering marvel that makes the distillery’s extraordinary stats not just possible, but repeatable and verifiable, batch after batch, year after year. If the brand’s founding story is the soul of Marble’s sustainability mission, WETS is its spine.
Here’s how it works. The distillation process generates large quantities of hot water and thermal energy as byproducts. In a conventional distillery, that water is discharged and that energy is simply lost — vented into the atmosphere as waste heat. WETS captures both. Every gallon of hot process water is stored in a 5,000-gallon recapture tank rather than sent down the drain. Every BTU of thermal energy is redirected back into the building’s systems rather than exhausted into the air. The result is a closed loop — a distillery that feeds itself from its own byproducts.
The system performs four distinct functions simultaneously:
- It stores hot water left over from distillation for reuse in future production cycles, eliminating the need to heat fresh water repeatedly.
- It uses excess thermal energy to heat the entire Marble facility — the distillery, the tasting room, and the on-site Distillery Inn — without relying on conventional heating systems.
- It transfers excess heat to prevent snow and ice accumulation on surrounding outdoor surfaces, a practical benefit in the Colorado high country.
- It repurposes excess cold water from cooling processes to air-condition both the distillery and the Inn’s guest rooms throughout the warmer months.
The numbers that result from this system are genuinely remarkable.
4 million+ gallons of water saved every year. For context: that’s enough water to fill roughly six Olympic-sized swimming pools, saved annually by a single small-batch distillery in a Colorado mountain town. While the industry average for vodka production sits at up to 100 bottles of water consumed per bottle of spirit produced, Marble operates at a 1:1 ratio. One bottle of water in. One bottle of spirit out. As Water Education Colorado has highlighted, this kind of efficiency isn’t just an environmental achievement — in the context of the American West’s deepening water crisis, it’s a moral imperative.
1.8 billion BTUs of energy harvested annually. That’s enough thermal energy to power approximately 20 homes for an entire year, captured entirely from the byproducts of making great spirits. The facility’s green code rating runs 83% lower than the town of Carbondale’s own energy standards — a benchmark that was already stricter than many municipalities — and Marble uses 20% less energy than comparable distilleries of its size.
Solar energy plays an important supporting role in the facility’s overall energy strategy. Both passive solar design — oriented windows, thermal mass materials, strategic shading — and active solar panels are integrated into the building. The distillery is 65% solar-powered, with a stated goal of reaching net-zero electricity. A detailed breakdown of Marble’s energy systems, as documented by Siemens, provides exceptional third-party validation of just how engineered this system truly is — this isn’t a distillery that installed a few solar panels and called it a day.
The zero-waste commitment extends well beyond water and energy. After each production run, the protein-rich spent grain mash — the solid byproduct of distillation — is returned to local ranchers in the Roaring Fork Valley for livestock feed. Not landfilled. Not composted into obscurity. Actively cycled back into the local agricultural ecosystem, supporting the ranching community that has been part of this valley’s fabric for generations.
On the sourcing side, Marble uses 100% Colorado-grown grains — reducing the carbon footprint of every ingredient that enters the facility before a single drop of spirit is distilled. The Crystal River, which runs through Carbondale and originates high in the Colorado Rockies, provides the pure mountain water that forms the base of every Marble spirit. And those spirits are filtered through crushed Yule Creek marble — not a synthetic filtration medium, but a naturally occurring mineral from a quarry that’s been part of this landscape for millennia.
As Axios reported in its coverage of Marble’s conservation mission, the distillery’s water practices directly address the broader crisis facing the Colorado River system — one of the most endangered river systems in North America. Every gallon Marble doesn’t consume is a gallon that stays in the watershed.
Read Marble’s full sustainability commitment in detail — because the data behind this operation deserves to be seen in full.
These practices aren’t just good for the planet — they’re made possible, in part, by where Marble calls home.
Why the Colorado High Country Makes Better Spirits and Better Stewardship
Place matters in spirits. It matters in wine, where a concept called terroir has been celebrated for centuries — the idea that the land, climate, altitude, and water of a region are literally present in the glass. Increasingly, the most thoughtful craft distillers are embracing the same idea. At Marble Distilling, place isn’t a marketing angle. It’s the operating system.
Carbondale, Colorado sits at approximately 6,200 feet above sea level in the Roaring Fork Valley, flanked by the Elk Mountains to the east and the Grand Hogback to the west. Mount Sopris — the iconic 12,965-foot peak that defines the town’s skyline — watches over the valley like a sentinel. This is a landscape that inspires reverence. The kind of place where people move deliberately, take long views, and think carefully about what they leave behind.
The Crystal River, which flows through Carbondale before joining the Roaring Fork River, is one of the cleaner, cooler, and more pristine waterways in the Colorado mountain system. It originates at elevations above 10,000 feet, filtered naturally through layers of limestone, snowpack, and — yes — Yule Creek marble before it reaches the valley floor. Marble Distilling draws from this source for every spirit it makes. The water’s purity isn’t incidental to the product’s quality; it’s foundational.
High-altitude distilling also has real, measurable effects on the process itself. At elevation, water boils at a lower temperature — around 202°F in Carbondale, compared to 212°F at sea level. This changes the dynamics of distillation in subtle but meaningful ways, affecting how volatile aromatic compounds are captured and preserved in the final spirit. The thinner air, the dramatic temperature swings between day and night, the low humidity — all of these environmental factors leave their fingerprints on the character of every bottle that comes off the still.
“The place is literally in the bottle.” — The philosophy behind every Marble spirit.
The Colorado River basin’s crisis adds urgent moral weight to everything Marble does. The Colorado River — once mighty enough to carve the Grand Canyon — has been so over-allocated, over-consumed, and under-replenished that in recent decades it has, at times, failed to reach the sea. Its tributaries, including the Crystal River, feel the pressure of every drop consumed upstream. As Axios reported, Marble’s conservation mission is directly connected to this larger crisis. The distillery’s 4-million-gallon annual water saving isn’t just a number — it’s a contribution to the long-term health of a river system that 40 million Americans depend on.
The Yule Creek Quarry, located about 20 miles from Carbondale near the town of Marble, CO, is one of the most storied stone sources in American history. The same brilliant white metamorphic marble that was transported via 11 miles of wooden flume and wagon road to build the Lincoln Memorial still comes out of that quarry today — and Marble Distilling uses crushed pieces of it to filter every spirit they produce. It’s one of those details that rewards contemplation: a monument meant to last forever, and a bottle filtered through the same ancient stone. Sustainability and story, wound together so tightly they can’t be separated.
All-natural, high-elevation Colorado grains round out the local sourcing commitment. By working with regional grain producers, Marble eliminates the long-haul trucking that typifies large-scale spirits production. Shorter supply chains mean lower emissions, fresher ingredients, and a tighter connection to the farming community that makes the whole operation possible. It’s a circular economy in microcosm — grain grown in Colorado, distilled in Colorado, with byproducts returned to Colorado’s land and livestock.
For those who want to experience this landscape firsthand, the Distillery Inn at Marble Distilling offers a rare opportunity to sleep where the spirits are made — surrounded by the mountains, the river, and the quiet of a valley that has been cared for by its community for generations. Or, if you can’t make the trip in person, take a virtual tour of the distillery and see the copper stills, the WETS system, and the marble filtration process for yourself.
Sustainability at Marble isn’t a solo act — and choosing to support sustainable spirits brands is one of the most direct ways consumers can participate in the movement.
How to Support Sustainable Spirits — and Why Your Choice Matters
Here’s something the spirits industry doesn’t say loudly enough: every bottle you buy is a vote. Not a metaphorical vote — a literal allocation of resources toward one model of production and away from another. When you choose a distillery that treats water as precious, that harvests its own energy, that returns its waste to the land — you are funding that model’s survival and growth. And when enough people make that choice, the economics of the entire industry begin to shift.
The case for sustainable spirits isn’t built on guilt or sacrifice. It’s built on the simple, compelling idea that the best products in any category are made by people who care deeply about every element of their craft — including the planet those ingredients come from. Quality and sustainability are not in tension. At Marble, they are the same thing, expressed from two different angles.
When you’re evaluating a spirits brand’s environmental claims, here’s what actually matters: Do they measure and report their water consumption? Can they tell you specifically where their ingredients come from? Do they have verifiable energy data, or just a vague commitment to “green practices”? Are their claims backed by third-party recognition — from organizations like DISCUS, or from press coverage that digs into the specifics? Sustainable distilling is a measurable discipline, and brands that are genuinely doing the work welcome that scrutiny.
Marble’s award-winning lineup — which includes Vodka, Whiskey, Fighting Whiskey, Rye Whiskey, Gingercello, Gingercello Reserve, Moonlight Expresso, and Moonlight Expresso Reserve — gives eco-conscious drinkers a full range of sustainably crafted options for any occasion. The Marble Vodka 80 was even named the Coolest Thing Made in Colorado in 2022, which is the kind of recognition that comes from doing everything right — the sustainability, the craft, and the taste.
These spirits also make exceptional gifts. There’s something meaningful about giving a bottle that carries a real story — not a fabricated origin myth, but an actual account of a specific mountain, a specific river, a specific quarry, and a group of people who chose to do things differently. In a world of generic gift options, a bottle of Marble Gingercello or Moonlight Expresso Reserve is a conversation starter and a values statement simultaneously. Whether you’re shopping for a whiskey lover, a cocktail enthusiast, a Colorado traveler, or simply someone who wants their holiday gifts to mean something — explore the full Marble spirits lineup and find something worth raising a glass to.
If you’re in Colorado, or planning to be, the experience of visiting Marble Distilling adds another dimension entirely. Club Marble — the distillery’s own bar — offers expertly crafted cocktails made with Marble spirits, served in the same building where those spirits were made, steps away from the copper pot stills. It’s the rare kind of drinking experience where the entire supply chain is visible from your bar stool. Distillery tours, available both in-person and virtually, give visitors an inside look at the WETS system, the marble filtration process, the rickhouse, and the ethos that holds it all together.
And then there’s the power of the word-of-mouth. Marble’s open-source model means that every time someone discovers this distillery — reads an article, tries a bottle, visits the bar, tells a friend — they’re potentially introducing that friend to a brand that is actively reshaping how the industry thinks about water, energy, and waste. Following Marble on social media, leaving a review, recommending a bottle — these are small acts with a genuinely outsized ripple effect, because Marble’s mission has always been bigger than a single distillery.
Find Marble spirits near you with the store locator — because sustainable choices should be easy ones.
Still have questions? Here are the ones we hear most often.
Sustainable Spirits Q&A: Your Questions Answered
Q: Is Marble Distilling certified sustainable?
Marble Distilling achieved net zero status in 2015 — the year it opened — and operates under a whole-systems sustainability model verified by measurable, publicly reported data. The distillery’s green code rating is 83% lower than Carbondale’s town standards, and its WETS system has been independently documented by Siemens. Co-founder Connie Baker was appointed in December 2021 as the first-ever craft distiller on the DISCUS Environmental Sustainability Committee — one of the spirits industry’s most significant sustainability recognitions. Marble also shares its entire business model and sustainability data openly, inviting scrutiny and replication across the industry.
Q: What spirits does Marble Distilling make?
Marble Distilling produces a full range of award-winning, sustainably crafted spirits — all made with 100% Colorado grains and pure Crystal River water, filtered through crushed Yule Creek marble. The current lineup includes Marble Vodka, Whiskey, Fighting Whiskey, Rye Whiskey, Gingercello, Gingercello Reserve, Moonlight Expresso, and Moonlight Expresso Reserve. The Marble Vodka 80 was named the Coolest Thing Made in Colorado in 2022, and the full range has earned recognition across the craft spirits community for exceptional quality alongside its environmental credentials.
Q: Where is Marble Distilling located?
Marble Distilling is located in Carbondale, Colorado, in the Roaring Fork Valley — high in the Rocky Mountains, at the edge of the Colorado River watershed. Visitors can take a tour of the distillery, enjoy handcrafted cocktails at Club Marble, or extend their stay at the on-site Distillery Inn, where the surrounding landscape becomes part of the experience itself. A virtual tour is also available for those exploring from afar.
Q: Why does sustainability matter in craft spirits?
Conventional distilling is one of the most water- and energy-intensive food production processes on earth — a single bottle of vodka can require up to 100 bottles of water to produce, drawing heavily on already-stressed watersheds like the Colorado River system. Sustainable distilleries like Marble Distilling prove definitively that world-class spirits can be crafted with a fraction of that environmental impact — saving millions of gallons of water, recapturing billions of BTUs of energy, and setting a new standard that the entire industry can follow. As Denver Westword noted, Marble is setting the benchmark for what sustainable craft distilling can look like at its very best.
The Next Time You Raise a Glass, Make It Count
Marble Distilling Co. didn’t stumble into sustainability. It was built there — designed into every pipe, every panel, every quarried stone and Colorado grain — by founders who believed that the most important question in craft spirits wasn’t just how does it taste, but what does it cost the world to make it?
The answer, at Marble, is less than almost anywhere else. More than 4 million gallons of water saved every year. 1.8 billion BTUs of energy harvested and redirected. A water-use ratio of 1:1 in an industry that often demands 100 times more. Net zero since the very first day the doors opened. Spent grain returning to local ranches. Pure Crystal River water in every bottle. Ancient Yule Creek marble filtering every spirit. Solar energy powering the roof. An open-source model freely shared with every distillery willing to learn. And two founders who didn’t just build a better distillery — they went to Washington, joined the committees, and started reshaping the rules for everyone.
Every bottle of Marble is a story of place: the Crystal River running cold and clear from the mountain snowpack. The Yule Creek marble that built a memorial meant to last forever. The Colorado high country, where the air is thin and the water is precious and the land demands respect. The founders who bet their passion on a better way — and won.
This is what the most sustainable distillery on the planet looks like. Not a certificate on a wall. Not a carbon offset purchased from a spreadsheet. A living, breathing, water-saving, energy-harvesting, grain-recycling, open-source operation tucked into a mountain valley in Colorado — making some of the best spirits you’ll ever taste, and doing it in a way that leaves the world a little better than it found it.
The next time you raise a glass, make it count.
🥃 Ready to Drink Differently?
Explore Marble’s full lineup of award-winning, sustainably crafted spirits — and taste what zero waste really means.
🏔️ Coming to Colorado?
Book a distillery tour, sip cocktails at Club Marble, or stay the night at the Distillery Inn — and see sustainable distilling in action, with the Rocky Mountains as your backdrop.
Can’t make the trip yet? Find Marble spirits near you and bring the mountain to your bar cart.
