Tag Archives: water

GreenBiz

PepsiCo’s Water-Saving Mission Flows Beyond Its Factories | GreenBiz

When it comes to water issues, PepsiCo‘s fizzy drinks tend to get all the attention. But the company is also a huge manufacturer of snack foods. Its food operations, PepsiCo is finding, offer huge potential to save water — including going “off the water grid.”

At a UK factory that makes Walkers potato chips — or “crisps,” as the locals prefer — PepsiCo is exploring the possibility that the potatoes themselves could yield enough water to operate the factory.

Potatoes offer a unique opportunity to turn off the taps, PepsiCo’s plant managers have recognized. When raw spuds arrive at the loading dock, they’re about 80 percent water by volume.

Indeed, the biggest challenge in making chips crispy is extracting all that water. As the thinly sliced spuds pass through the deep fryer, a thick fog of steam rises from the oil’s surface, as the water steams off.

Instead of letting it escape through a chimney, PepsiCo is exploring the possibility of capturing the vapor, condensing it to reuse and maybe recapturing the heat energy at the same time. It’s a move the company estimates could save the plant in Leicester, England, $1 million per year.

PepsiCo’s UK and Ireland arm has become a leader in setting ambitious environmental and operating goals. These also include being fossil fuel free by 2023 and achieving zero landfill across its supply chain by 2018 (click here to see more on the UK and Ireland goals).

Thinking like this is helping PepsiCo push ahead with ambitious goals globally, to cut water use across the beverage-and-snack conglomerate’s worldwide operations, says Dan Bena, PepsiCo’s director of sustainable development.

I caught up with Dan last week to hear how things were going since Pepsi published its inaugural water reportlast September (click here to download a PDF).

The report followed PepsiCo’s move in 2009 to publicly endorse water as a human right, just in advance of a similar declaration by the UN general assembly.

PepsiCo’s approach combines internal efforts at its plants with collaborative programs to conserve supplies of and improve access to clean water globally.

As part of a broader set of corporate sustainability goals, PepsiCo is specifically aiming to:

  • Improve water use efficiency by 20 percent per unit of production by 2015 compared with 2006;
  • Strive for positive water balance in operations in water-distressed areas; and
  • Provide access to safe water to 3 million people in developing countries by the end of 2015.

Efforts to cut water are ahead of schedule to beat the 20-by-2015 goal, says Bena. To drive this process within its factories, the company is turning to ReCon — short for “resource conservation” — a homemade analytic tool that maps out the use of energy and water in manufacturing plants. Deployed at hundreds of sites, and used in collaboration with supply-chain partners, the tool has saved many millions of dollars in water and energy costs.

“There’s a myth that water is cheap in many areas,” says Bena. “Even in places where it is inexpensive to buy, once you start measuring, you see the costs of treating water, using it, filtering it, and discharging it piling up.

“In some cases, we’re seeing a tenfold increase in the fully measured cost of water from when it enters a facility to when the process is complete. When business people see water costs real money, there’s no better way to get their attention.”

Bena explained that the second of PepsiCo’s three water goals, above, amounts to a kind of “one-for-one” rule. For every liter of water the company uses, PepsiCo hopes to restore, replenish or prevent the waste of as much or more water.

By this measure, Bena says that PepsiCo has already exceeded this goal in India thanks to its role developing a direct-seeding technology for rice. The method drastically reduces the period during which the rice stalks must be submerged in 6 to 12 inches of water.

“We patented a piece of equipment that saves about 30 percent of the water compared with traditional methods,” says Bena.

PepsiCo’s R&D team developed the specialized tractor over about four years, and has given Indian farmers free access to the equipment, along with technical guidance to learn new growing methods.

According to a World Business Council case study of the effort, PepsiCo’s initiative also cut farmers’ costs by 3,500 rupees (about $80) per hectare compared with traditional methods. Extended to 2,630 hectares (approx. 6,500 acres) in 2009, the system conserved an estimated 5.5 billion liters of water.

In addition, the Indian Government estimates that reduced water use lowers the paddy’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 70 percent, cutting down the volume of rotting vegetative mass, which gives off methane, in the standing water.

To push towards its third goal, providing safe water to 3 million people by 2015, PepsiCo has been focusing on developing public water kiosks in Ghana, India and Kenya. “There’s a misconception that people can’t or shouldn’t pay for water,” says Bena. “The reality is that in many poor countries, they already do, and they pay a high price for low quality water.”

Working with Water.org — which is the culmination of the July 2009 merger between Water Partners International and Matt Damon’s H20 Africa Foundation — PepsiCo is trying to supplant high-priced, private water distributors to build community taps.

There’s another benefit, too. “By brining water into a community, you eliminate the time children — often hours, and usually girls — typically spend fetching fresh water,” says Bena.

Back in the factories where it makes fizzy drinks, PepsiCo continues to drive down the volume of water use. “On average, it takes about 2.5 liters of water to produce one liter of beverage.”

“It’s really variable though,” Bena says. “Some newer, advanced plants are running at half that ratio. Some older ones are probably double that. That’s the opportunity that we face.”

Image courtesy of PepsiCo.

Check out the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2011/04/19/pepsicos-water-saving-mission-flows-beyond-its-factories?page=full

BusinessWeek

Cleaning Up an Effluent Society: New EPA rules have spawned a wave of spending aimed at stemming the flow of stormwater-borne contaminants into local waterways | BusinessWeek

What’s driving Chicago to pour $3 billion into a 109-mile network of tunnels and reservoirs hacked out of the limestone underlying the Windy City? It’s the same fetid force that spurred Los Angeles voters to O.K. a $500 million bond last November. Construction titans and big-box retailers are getting more serious about it, too. It’s causing thousands of other U.S. cities and companies to yank up manhole covers and storm grates and take a closer look at the witches’ brew of garbage, hydrocarbons, and bacteria that flows down curbside drains and eventually into local waters. Under foot and out of sight, those conduits are a growing problem. They empty untreated stormwater into rivers and lakes. This water can, at its worse, “kill fish and wildlife, close beaches, and threaten human health,” explains Steve Fleischli, executive director of Waterkeeper Alliance, a nonprofit watchdog group based in Irvington, N.Y.

2008 DEADLINE. That’s why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has made cleaning up stormwater a must-do for the nation’s municipalities. The EPA Web site describes storm runoff as “one of the most significant sources of water pollution in the nation, comparable to contamination from industrial and sewage sources.”By the end of 2008, EPA rules say that cities with population of more than 10,000 must have a plan in place to stem the flow of debris and contaminants from curbside into local waterways. The rule has unleashed a wave of spending on everything from megascale engineering projects like Chicago’s Deep Tunnel to innovative drain drop-ins that cleanse the water that passes through it.

Stormwater can pollute, sicken, and even kill. First, it’s highly polluted from the get-go. While rain water may fall from the sky clean, it becomes foul the instant it hits the street. The contaminants include an estimated 1 million gallons of dissolved hydrocarbons — oil and gas dripping from the nation’s 200 million-plus vehicles — per year, as a toxic stew of animal and human fecal bacteria, rubbish, and traces of heavy metals, pesticides, and herbicides, particularly in suburban and rural areas.

What’s more, many storm systems flow directly to waterways and lakes. Tom Leary, stormwater program officer at the City of Long Beach’s Public Works Dept., explains that when it rains in the Los Angeles/Long Beach area, anything within the 875-square-mile Los Angeles River drainage area “is flushed into the sewers and eventually into the river.” Last year that included some 12,000 tons of rubbish that washed up on city beaches.

BAD BEACH DAYS. Sewage spills pose a related, more complicated problem. Many cities linked their storm drains to sewage pipes — in part or in whole — because of the hazard posed by untreated stormwater. The idea: By passing storm runoff through sewage treatment plants, rainwater can be cleared of garbage and toxins. And this works when the pipes can handle the flow.

Yet in cases when a heavy rain fills up both pipe networks, they can back up and flood city streets with sewage-tainted water, as used to happen in Chicago. The contaminated water is then forced into nearby rivers or lakes. Sewage spills can spike bacterial (fecal coliform) counts for days, exposing bathers to cholera and other diseases. Along California’s coast, for example, “Closed Beach” days have been common in recent years because of health risks posed by sewage plumes.

Big companies are in the firing line, too. Construction projects and multi-acre parking lots are particularly serious sources of what the EPA describes as “non-point pollution” flowing into sewers. The agency has lately been turning up the heat on big-box retailers and large property developers, says Fleischli. Together with the U.S. Justice Dept. and a number of states, the EPA reached a settlement with Wal-Mart Stores (WMT ) in 2004 for violating the Clean Water Act during store construction. The retailer agreed to pay a $3.1 million civil penalty and to reduce tainted runoff from its sites.

RESURRECTED RIVER. Chicago’s approach has been to build what amounts to a very big holding tank for its sewage and rain water. Formally known as the Tunnel and Reservoir Project, the EPA-funded network was begun in 1974 and is made up of subterranean tunnels, many the width of a locomotive, connected to a series of concrete caverns. By storing wastewater until it can be processed by sewage treatment plants, the largely completed system is already helping to make Chicago area waters cleaner.

Once infamous for its lifeless, inky, and occasionally even flammable water quality, the Chicago River has been resurrected with the return of some 50 species of fish, along with canoeists and riverside cafés, if not swimmers quite yet. You can see the progress at this slide show.

Compared to Chicago’s big dig, Norwalk (Conn.) has taken a micro approach. Rather than tear up its streets, the city turned to privately-held AbTech Industries Inc. to buy a high-tech filter that can be dropped into the existing stormwater drains. AbTech’s Ultra Urban Filter (UUF) liners are made of a patented polymer that lets water pass through, but bonds permanently with oil, PCBs, and other toxins, while also catching more common trash. When treated with a proprietary anti-bacterial, nontoxic coating, the sponges can also zap harmful bacteria as water passes through the popcorn-like material. In addition to routing debris removal, typically done with storm sewers, the UUF’s anti-bacterial and oil-trapping capacity lasts about two years.

LIGHT TREATMENT. Other cities and companies are following suit. Long Beach, for example, is using a “treatment train” combining UUFs, garbage nets, and a handful of mechanical separators that spin wastewater to separate debris. Alternatives include more costly chlorination, ozonation, and/or power-hungry devices that use ultraviolet light to sanitize water as it passes through.

Yet, none combine antibacterial properties with the ability to drop them into existing storm drains, with a minimum of costly construction, explains Glenn Rink, president and chief executive of AbTech. At about $1,000 per drain, UUFs can help a city clean up its waterways, for thousands or millions of dollars, rather than billions. With over 275 UUFs in key areas around Norwalk paid for by a $500,000 EPA grant, the filters are proving to remove, on average, 75% of harmful bacteria, and up to 99.9%.

With the EPA’s deadline drawing nigh, pressure to clean up stormwater runoff is just beginning to rise. Nationwide, the number of roadside catch basins — in cities and rural areas — is estimated to be over 5 million. Cleaning them all is a Olympian task, but you can do your own small part: Rather than toss that cigarette butt or dog poop down a sewer grate, look for a trash can instead.

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See the original story here: http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/mar2006/pi20060322_393443.htm

BusinessWeek

Book review – Water Everywhere…And Not a Drop to Drink? | BusinessWeek

Business Week Online

AUGUST 12, 2002

BOOKS
By Adam Aston

BLUE GOLD
The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water
By Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke
New Press — 278pp — $25.95

WATER WARS
Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst
By Diane Raines Ward
Riverhead Books — 280pp — $24.95

Summer, for most of us, means water-soaked fun at a pool, lakeside, or beach. But as we nonchalantly paddle about, the world’s water supply is imperiled. Consider some of this year’s headlines: Unprecedented wildfires in Arizona fueled by moisture-starved brush. Hydropower shortages in the Pacific Northwest. Creeping desertification of farmland in the Midwest, Central Africa, and East Asia. The situation is grim and getting worse.

It’s a crisis that goes largely unacknowledged. The reason, argue two recent books, is that the developed world’s technical mastery over water has led to a false sense of security. In Blue Gold, activists Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke offer an angry and persuasive account of how this has damaged the environment and how the privatization of once-public water resources threatens to exacerbate the problem. In Water Wars, conservationist Diane Raines Ward provides a less polemical, more engaging story of “drought, flood, and folly” across the planet.

Both books marshal abundant data to support their conclusions. Global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, twice the rate of population growth, observe Barlow and Clarke. Worse, toxins from cities, factories, and farms are spoiling freshwater supplies: More than half the world’s rivers are polluted. Meanwhile, as Ward details, lowlands around the world are engaged in a losing fight against rising sea levels.

Sometimes, the books’ flow of statistics can be numbing. For example, Blue Gold notes that the earth has 330 million cubic miles of water, but just 8,000 cubic miles available as circulating freshwater. Is that a lot or a little?

Yet the authors more than compensate for such lapses, while tackling the crisis from different angles. Blue Gold describes the moneyed interests plunging into the water business. It tells how Perrier, Evian, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo–and particularly the French giants Vivendi and Suez–are buying up rights to mine free public aquifers, then bottling and selling their products around the world. Blue Gold‘s central question: Is access to water a fundamental right, or is water a salable good? If it’s a right, then countries have a duty to distribute water to their citizens. But if considered a good, water gets caught up in the calculus of profit maximization.

Clearly, the authors are in the rights camp, holding that local communities should set water policy. But they make a strong case that the water-as-commodity view is winning. A spate of rulings by the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank treat water as an economic good. And many poor countries, unable to afford the capital costs, have invited private companies to run their water systems, sometimes ceding control to foreign interests. “Maximizing profit is the prime goal, not ensuring sustainability or equal access to water,” write Barlow and Clarke.

Their stance is well-served by a description of U.S. engineering giant Bechtel Group Inc.’s disastrous 1998 investment in the water system of Cochabamba, Bolivia. To recoup its spending on infrastructure, Bechtel raised water fees so high that the poor could not afford them. The resulting riots led to the ejection of Bechtel and the return of the assets to public management. “Cochabamba” has since become a rallying cry for activists opposing similar privatizations elsewhere.

Water Wars, despite its action-movie title, doesn’t draw such sharp lines between good and bad. Ward’s intent is to describe mankind’s complex relationship with water. She is fascinated by such megaprojects as Holland’s $8 billion system of storm-surge gates that can seal off Rotterdam harbor from North Sea storms. Visiting the ruins of a 5,000-year-old dam in the Egyptian desert, she reflects that the urge to find, dam, and channel water is one of the earliest spurs to technological advancement.

Yet Ward is saddened by our destructive treatment of water. Evaluating megascale projects, she finds that many costs come with the benefits. Dams, for example, are built to irrigate land for farming. But poorly designed dams let sediment accumulate behind them, starving downstream farms of nutrients.

Indeed, many of the 20th century’s greatest victories are double-edged when it comes to water. Ward talks to countless people caught up in the contradictions. One is Jacobus Van Dixhoorn, director of the Netherlands’ water-control bureau, who lives on a farm below sea level. He explains how the centuries-old Dutch obsession with holding back the sea has resulted in some of the world’s most uneconomic farmland, maintained only by a massive network of dikes and pumps. Like much of Ward’s book, the tale is at once compelling and sad.

Both books suffer from lack of illustrations. They’re packed with explanations of water-control structures and the physical features of the hydrosphere–but rely on words alone to tell how over-irrigated land can turn snow-white with deadly salt, or where the shrinking Ogllala Aquifer in the Western U.S. lies.

Still, the words alone are plenty to inspire and alarm. Blue Gold will make you want to waste less water, while Water Wars may induce you to visit the Hoover Dam. Together, they make the point that the lifeblood of planet earth can’t be taken for granted.

Aston is Industries editor