Tag Archives: food

The Guardian

Responsible investment has a vital role in securing peace post-conflict | The Guardian

A new UN initiative aims to help spur recovery in post-conflict regions by guiding companies to invest responsibly

A Syrian family at a camp on the Turkish border. Even when wars are over, they often leave a pool of underemployed youth and a time-bomb of social unrest. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

War and peace are linked inextricably by economic development. Often, even when the shooting stops, long-term peace is impossible without economic development. Yet investment will not flow where conflict lingers.

This grim Catch-22 has resurfaced lately with the unfolding catastrophe in Syria. Day by day, the death toll, physical destruction, and refugee displacements mount. The disaster is creating countless long term, chronic woes too. The destruction of 3,600 schools, for instance, in Syria has swelled by two million or so the global tally of young people forced out of school by armed conflict to some 50 million overall.

In Syria and elsewhere this creates a pool of underemployed youth, and a potential time bomb of social unrest.

Once conflict ends, if there are no jobs for young people, rebels and soldiers, “The guns will come back out… In the absence of economic development, peace is difficult to achieve, and harder to maintain,” Sir Mark Moody-Stuart told me. From his tenure as Chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Moody-Stuart is familiar with the challenges, and opportunities, facing investment in conflict-afflicted regions.

Data on the economic toll of the loss of peace is difficult to come by, but an analysis by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), estimated that had the world been completely peaceful in 2011, global GDP would have been roughly $9tn higher — almost equal to the German and Japanese economies combined.

These days, as vice-chair of the board of the UN Global Compact, Moody-Stuart is working to get the private sector to reconsider these opportunities. “Not so very long ago, divestment from troubled areas was the goal,” he said.

Today, however, former critics are increasingly willing to “sit down with investors and senior management to engage constructively and work together on strategies that both develop business and contribute to peace and development,” he said.

I met with Moody-Stuart in New York at a midtown hotel where he was unveiling a new UN effort to help guide private-sector investment into regions where they can help peace was taking root. The platform, Business for Peace (B4P), will be formally launched today by the UN secretary-general at the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit. B4P builds on a decade’s worth of earlier efforts that are documented in areport, Responsible Business Advancing Peace, also released today.

The cases documented therein — and discussed at today’s meeting — are a reminder that the path peace via development is a highly local challenge, where solutions vary by context.

Peaceful cheese, fewer guns

Cheese is the focus of a long-running effort in the Caucasus. Starting a decade ago, cheese makers from regions spanning Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey came together under a single brand that has developed strong export sales.

The shared interests prevented the alliance from collapsing during the Russia-Georgia war of 2008. “It was one only regional alliances to survive,” said Diana Klein, conflict advisor at International Alert. Peace and development have their own momentum, she added, “If it’s working, it’s much harder for a single participant to act out.”

Some efforts can run counter to conventional wisdom. In the Philippines’ a subsidiary of Swiss cement giant Holcim set up a plant north of Manila where communist rebel group was active.

In 2005, the group attacked the facility, taking weapons from guards and causing $120,000 of damage. Rather than boost its guards’ firepower, Holcim took a slower, more complex path, meeting with community members to learn more why its plant — a large local employer — was targeted.

Their surprising findings? The guards’ firearms were part of the target. Rather than meet threat with force, Holcim opted for un-armed guards, a change which required careful community education.

“They had to convince their own staff they were safe, to convince the community that the guards are truly not armed,” said Sir Moody-Stuart, otherwise the guerillas may come back. Since this “social fencing” approach began, not a single incident involving firearms has happened.

A marathon effort

Building companies and attracting investors in the wake of conflict is a “very, very hard challenge,” said Klein of Conflict Advisors. “It requires a marathon mentality.” These investment efforts are reaching into some of the most challenging conflicts in recent memory.

In Sudan, still recovering from genocide in Darfur and the subsequent bifurcation of the nation, a team of B4P-affiliated investors with stakes in Sudanese oil services companies find their most difficult issue — company affiliation with human rights violations — impossible to resolve.

But while some strata of the market remain opaque, others are opening. Bit-by-bit the economy is coming back to life. Telecoms provider Sudatel, partially government owned, has emerged as the young country’s first multinational, operating in five neighboring countries. With 60% of Sudan’s population under 20 years of age, the company is focusing on serving young consumers. “To live together, people need to communicate,” said Ehab Osman, Sudatel’s CEO.

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See the original article here: 
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/responsible-investment-role-peace-post-conflict

Corporate Knights

How recovering water from fresh potatoes helps a PepsiCo chips factory turn off the taps | Corporate Knights

For PepsiCo, one of the world’s biggest makers of potato chips, the key to producing the crispiest chips possible is all about driving moisture out of raw potatoes. Paradoxically, though, potatoes are made up mostly of water.

At a Walkers Crisps factory in Leicester, England, PepsiCo is turning this soggy challenge into a water-saving innovation. The goal: to extract so much water from inbound spuds that the factory can go “off grid,” drawing little or no water from public taps. Doing so, PepsiCo hopes, will help save the plant roughly $1 million a year in avoided water costs.

“The idea for taking factories off the water grid came from a simple observation by our front-line teams that potatoes are 80 per cent water,” says Martyn Seal, PepsiCo’s European director of sustainability.

PepsiCo’s efforts to turn off the taps at its Walkers plant in the U.K. is one sliver of a bigger batch of initiatives to make its global operations run with less water. In 2010, the food-and-drink giant, which turned over $66.5 billion (U.S.) in sales last year, released its first comprehensive water report. The effort, similar to initiatives out of rival Coca-Cola, set out details of its water consumption alongside plans on how to use that water more productively.

One of its headline goals is to improve the efficiency of water use – measured by water consumed per unit of production – by 20 per cent by 2015, using 2006 as a baseline. PepsiCo hit this target last year, four years ahead of schedule. Another goal is to strive for “positive water balance” in water-distressed areas. This means for every unit of water PepsiCo uses, it strives to restore, replenish or prevent loss of the same amount or more in the same region. It also aims to provide access to safe water for three million people in developing countries before 2016.

Early on, potato-chip plants emerged as a juicy target for these goals. Making chips is surprisingly water intensive. In a normal year, some 350,000 metric tons of fresh tubers is shipped to the Leicester factory – the equivalent of some 13,000 tractor-trailer loads.

In the plant, potatoes are washed, peeled and sliced. A steady flow of H2O is used at each of these steps. In Leicester, this process demands roughly 700 million litres of water annually, the equivalent of roughly 280 Olympic-sized pools. Yet as crucial as water is while preparing the raw spuds, it’s an unwanted troublemaker thereafter. The thin slices are plunged for a few minutes into oversized fryers filled with oil boiling at 190°C (375°F). Water trapped in the potato slices vapourizes instantly, turning the otherwise inedible starch into an addictively crunchy treat.

In a conventional set-up, the cloud of steam that rises from these vats is vented out into the air. PepsiCo engineers recognized that the vapour represents a huge waste of both water and energy. To recover these wisps of moisture, PepsiCo fit a contraption onto the plant’s exhaust towers. Inside, the hot steam passes over a network of thin, cooled tubes. Moisture from the potato vapour condenses on the cooler tubes for easy collection. The process also recaptures traces of cooking oil from the exhaust. Both the oil and water can be reused. About four-fifths of the moisture that is normally lost is recovered.

Together with systems that recycle about two-thirds of the plant’s wastewater, the steam-recapture project is on track to supply enough water to hit PepsiCo’s goal of drawing zero freshwater in Leicester. The company is already testing the technology at similar sites in Holland and Belgium, part of a plan to extend these practices to other large European operations and, later, worldwide.

A successful pilot in the Leicester plant “will provide us with a technology suite that we will be able to reapply at other PepsiCo plants, particularly in areas of severe water scarcity,” Seal says. “This is an opportunity to realize meaningful cost savings while reducing our impact on the environment.”

Combined with other projects across PepsiCo’s operations, the steam-recapture efforts contributed to savings of $45 million in water and related energy costs last year, compared with the 2006 base when the company began these efforts. By volume, in 2011 it used 16 billion fewer litres of water, compared with 2006.

As much as PepsiCo execs crow about the bottom-line impact of these efforts, they point to strategic benefits too: The company must plan for operating risks that droughts pose to future operations. By 2030, global demand for freshwater could exceed supplies by 40 per cent, explains Dan Bena, PepsiCo’s senior director of sustainable development.

“If this gap is not closed, there will be no business as we know it today,” he says.

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See the original story here: http://www.corporateknights.com/article/tech-savvy-pepsico

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

GreenBiz

Coca-Cola Decides to Gulp Down the Rest of Honest Tea | GreenBiz

Coca-Cola Decides to Gulp Down the Rest of Honest Tea
Honest Tea, the fast-growing 13-year-old vendor of organic teas, first attracted the attention of Coca-Cola back in 2008, when the fizzy drinks giant took a 40 percent stake in the green-minded startup. Today, CEO Seth Goldman announced that Honest Tea had notified its shareholders of Coke’s decision to exercise its option to buy the balance of those shares, almost three years to the day after their original agreement. The deal is on track to close within the next few weeks.

The deal would cap a period of accelerating growth for the Bethesda, Md.-based tea brand. Sales peaked at some 100 million units of bottles and bags last year, bringing sales close to $100 million, Goldman explained, thanks in part to a boost in distribution that came from the original deal with Coke.

State of Green Business

“We’ve seen growth three-fold,” said Goldman, thanks in part to current or pending distribution deals with major national chains including CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid. The high point of Honest Tea’s arrival to the mainstream, Goldman joked, may have been marked when the company appeared as a clue in a New York Times Friday crossword puzzle. The clue, “Honest ______ (drink brand).” The answer: Honest Ade, not Tea — one for the experts.

In a nod to Goldman’s central role as founder and CEO — or TeaEO — Coke has ensured that he maintains an equity stake in the operation and will continue to run the brand. The move is unprecedented, Goldman told attendees at the State of Green Business Forum today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Coke has a well-evolved business process for buying up small-brands, transitioning out the founder and folding the products into the parent’s larger manufacturing, distribution and marketing operations. “A veteran of the beverage business told me that after a takeover, for the first few weeks, they want to know your opinion, for the next few weeks, they want to know your telephone number, and after that they don’t want to know you,” said Goldman. “This was unusual for Coke, but came from the chairman.”

Speaking with GreenBiz.com’s senior writer, Marc Gunther, Goldman acknowledged the decision stirs charges that the organic tea brand is compromising its green integrity. Honest Tea has cultivated sustainable practices among its tea suppliers to achieve USDA certified organic status. It has also ruled out using high fructose corn syrup, and has certified its products as Fair Trade.

Goldman dismisses the charge, arguing that scaling up his business is the path to delivering the greatest benefits most broadly. “It’s easy to fall into a ‘big is bad, small is good’ trap,” said Goldman. “To those critics, I ask, ‘What’s your strategy to change corporate America?'”

Coke has proven loath to tinker with Honest Tea’s green appeal — even in the face of tension with the newcomer. The companies attracted national attention in 2010 when The New York Times detailed a conflict over Honest Tea’s decision to brand its kids’ beverage line as free of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), despite pressure from Coke. The big drink brand was facing charges over the synthetic nature of the corn-derived sweetener along with the high calorie count of its fizzy drinks…

Continue reading here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2011/02/16/coca-cola-gulps-down-rest-honest-tea
GreenBiz

BSR 2010: What Will it Take to Feed the Future? | GreenBiz

BSR 2010: What Will it Take to Feed the Future?

Food production sits at the intersection of some of the most fraught concerns in the landscape of sustainability. Combining life-or-death issues of nutrition, with pressing concerns about the environment together with questions over the role of big industrial players in agricultural, food production sparks passions in boardrooms and dining rooms alike.

At BSR 2010, the tensions pulling at these issues surfaced in a standing-room-only session titled “Feeding the Future: What will it Take.”

World Wildlife Fund’s Jason Clay, who ran his family’s farm early in his life, laid out the challenge facing the world’s food production systems. Today, just 30 percent of arable land remains unfarmed. Yet over the last 10 years, that share of farmed land has grown by bout 0.6 percent per year. If this pace continues steadily, by 2050, all but 6 percent of untouched arable land will be put to use, meaning rain forests and other pristine environments will be imperiled.

“Suddenly there will be no biodiversity left. We will eat the planet. We have to figure out how to do more with less,” said Clay. To get there from here, without eating the planet, Clay estimates we’ll have to do about twice as much with every input — whether plants, or phosphorus, or water, or land.

Clay pointed out that water is another huge constraint. Today humans use half the fresh water supply on the planet, and of that, about 70 percent goes for farming. Put another way, he explained that it takes about 1 liter of water to produce each calorie of food we eat. So a person’s daily water consumption isn’t really the few liters they drink directly, but the 2,500 or 3,000 liters they eat each day.

Driving the food consumption is rising wealth. By 2050, Clay predicts, the world will have some 9 billion people, with 2.9 times more income on average than today. And in many of the largest, less developed countries, income could grow by 5 times per capita.

By practically any measure, wealth translates into healthier populations. But as newly wealthy populations boost their meat intake, the impact on food systems will be stressful, and enormous. A richer world will eat more protein, which demands much more energy, water and farming resources to grow. “We’re seeing it with pork in China and eggs in India,” said Clay.

To feed this richer, more populous world, Clay emphasized that no single strategy can do the trick, so we should be pursuing many at once. Reducing waste is among the best near term steps, he points out, given that one of every three food calories is wasted worldwide.

By simply eliminating wasted food, said Clay, “we could produce half as much additional new food we expect to need under the business as usual plan.” Sounds easy? But it runs against deeply ingrained practices in restaurants — where portion sizes are often too big — and shoppers’ love affair with fresh food. Transporting fresh food not only wastes about half the food, but uses more energy.

via greenbiz.com