Food and Beverage Companies Go Green

The Londonderry, N.H.-based yogurt maker was among America’s first companies to go carbon neutral, in the 1990s. Stonyfield also gives 10 percent of its profits to organizations that “help protect and restore the environment.”

From 1995 to 2005 it reduced facility energy use and the associated CO2 emissions per pound of product by one-third, saving some $1.7 million and 46 million kWh – enough energy to power 4,500 homes for a year. It also prevented more than 14,000 tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, Hirshberg told Industry Week.

The company’s 50 kW solar photovoltaic array on its yogurt making facility is the largest in New Hampshire. It is in the vanguard of wind energy, reforestation, methane recovery and energy efficiency projects, and it created the first “how-to guide” showing other companies how to offset emissions. Its award-winning program to minimize solid waste has prevented over 16 million lbs. of materials from going to landfills or incinerators (equal to taking more than 1,400 cars off the road for one year).

Coca-Cola Enterprises: Reducing its carbon footprint

It may not be a Coach, but this handbag, created by TerraCycle, says a lot about recycling.

Red Bull bought a fleet of diesel hybrid delivery trucks from Navistar International. The trucks achieve 30-40 percent better fuel efficiency and emit up to 33 percent less hydrocarbon emissions and 35 percent less nitrogen oxide emissions than standard diesel trucks.

(www.cokecce.com), the biggest bottler of Coca-Cola, won the 2007 Golden Peacock Award for Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting by the World Council for Corporate Governance and the Centre for Sustainability and Excellence. It focuses on three environmental goals: sustainable packaging, water stewardship and climate and energy protection. Coca-Cola Enterprises

With 1.3 billion products sold each day, reusable packaging is key to CCE’s sustainability efforts. The company spent some $60 in recycling initiatives in 2007 and created Coca-Cola Recycling LLC to recover and recycle the packaging materials used by the system (plastic, aluminum, cardboard and plastic film). Its goal is to recycle or reuse 100 percent of its PET plastic bottles and aluminum cans it sells in the U.S. Reusing the cans would require 95 percent less energy than creating aluminum from raw materials and reduces carbon emissions by 95 percent.

CCE also plans to build the world's largest plastic bottle-to-bottle recycling plant in Spartanburg, S.C., and establish a water stewardship plan, which calls for using just one liter of water for every liter of product produced -- what the company calls water neutrality.

In 2004, the company joined forces with Unilever and McDonald’s to launch “Refrigerants Naturally!” Other companies have joined, including Coca-Cola's biggest competitor PepsiCo, to work together to test commercially viable refrigeration technologies free of hydrofluoric carbons.

PepsiCo: Harnessing the power of the sun

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Green Power Partnership was established in 2001 to encourage U.S. companies to voluntarily purchase green power as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated with conventional electricity generation. Green sources of electricity include solar/photovoltaic, wind, geothermal, low-impact hydropower and other forms of renewable power generation.

Purchase, N.Y.-based PepsiCo (www.pepsico.com) recently topped the EPA Green Power Partnership list of the top 25 largest purchasers of renewable energy by purchasing renewable energy certificates (RECs) to match the company’s annual 1.1 billion kWh of purchased electricity. PepsiCo’s REC purchase will match the electricity used at all of its U.S.-based manufacturing facilities, headquarters, distribution centers and regional offices for three years, computing to the same amount of electricity needed to power nearly 90,000 American homes annually.

In the early 1990s, PepsiCo’s Frito Lay division formed Green Teams to focus on energy efficiency projects. Solar power was installed in six of its distribution centers, and in October last year, solar power was installed on the roof of its largest distribution center, located in Arizona. It produces roughly 350,000 kWh of electricity annually.

In addition to solar power installations at its distribution centers, plants such as the Tropicana facility in Fort Pierce, Fla., use supplemental power from a local landfill’s by-product methane gas for its energy needs. The Casa Grande, Ariz., potato chip factory has a goal to run almost entirely on renewable fuels and recycled water. PepsiCo is also an award-winning company in the EPA’s Energy Star program, and it is encouraging its supply chain partners to develop more energy efficient ways. 

Unilever: Greenhouse gas profiling tool

In addition to making most lists of global sustainable companies, London-based Unilever (www.unilever.com) uses a Business Partner Code to ensure that its suppliers meet expectations on environmental and social impacts. Since more than two-thirds of Unilever’s raw materials come from agriculture, its Sustainable Agriculture Programme has a key role in managing upstream impacts.