Water Education Foundation
This is just one post in the Great Green Ideas Category
Click here to view all posts

Frito-Lay plans an environment-friendly potato chip

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 16, 2007 at 7:35 am

From the International Herald-Tribune:

CASA GRANDE, Arizona: At Frito-Lay’s factory here, more than 500,000 pounds of potatoes arrive every day from New Mexico to be washed, sliced, fried, seasoned and portioned into bags of Lay’s and Ruffles chips. The process devours enormous amounts of energy, and creates vast amounts of waste water, starch and potato peelings.

But Frito-Lay is embarking on an ambitious plan to change the way this factory operates, and in the process, create a new type of snack: the environmentally benign chip.

Its goal is to take the Casa Grande plant off the power grid, or nearly so, and run it almost entirely on renewable fuels and recycled water. Net zero, as the concept is called, has the backing of the highest levels of corporate executives at PepsiCo, the parent company of Frito-Lay.

There are benefits besides the potential energy savings. Like many other large corporations, PepsiCo is striving to establish its green credentials as consumers become more focused on climate change. There are marketing opportunities, too. The company, for example, intends to advertise that its popular SunChips snacks are made using solar energy.

“We don’t know what the complete payoff for net zero is going to be,” said Indra Nooyi, chairman and chief executive of PepsiCo. “If this works even to 50 or 60 percent of its potential, that is fantastic, and it’s so much better than what we already have.”

Just how do they plan to do this?

Over the next several years, Frito-Lay plans to install high-technology filters that would recycle most of the water used to rinse and wash the about 230,000 kilograms of potatoes it receives each day, as well as the corn used to make Doritos and other snacks, and then burn the leftover sludge to create methane gas to run the plant’s boiler.

The company will also build at least 50 acres, or 20 hectares, of solar concentrators behind the plant to generate solar power. A biomass generator, which most likely will burn agricultural waste, is also planned to provide additional renewable fuel.

The retrofit of the Casa Grande factory, scheduled to be completed by 2010, would reduce electricity and water consumption by 90 percent and use of natural gas by 80 percent. Greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by 50 percent to 75 percent, the company said.

To read the rest of this article from the International Herald-Tribune, click here.

November 16, 2007 · Filed Under Great Green Ideas

Comments

Leave a Reply