Words by Smiley Team
PepsiCo, Inc. has revealed the new ways it will be progressing against its ambition to be Net Water Positive by 2030, aiming to replenish more water than the company uses – and it's all part of the pep+ (PepsiCo Positive) transformation.
A huge part of this includes developing a new technology to recover more than 50% of the water used in its potato chip manufacturing, investing nearly $2 million for the Colorado River Basin, extending safe water access to 8 million more people in 2021, and signing a new partnership to scale a groundbreaking drip irrigation technology across 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) by 2025.
“PepsiCo has just nine years to reach our ambitious 2030 Net Water Positive goals, so there is no time to waste,” said Jim Andrew, Chief Sustainability Officer at PepsiCo.
“We’re taking a look at our full value chain, from top to bottom, and asking, how can we leverage the innovation and creativity that exists within our company to ensure that the water resources PepsiCo uses are better off a decade from now than they are today?”
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Since the company’s “Net Water Positive” announcement in August 2021, more than a dozen new programmes have been created to advance the company’s water-use efficiency, replenishment, and safe water access efforts.
A big part of the company's mission will be to create new technology that will recover more than 50% of water used in its crisp manufacturing.
PepsiCo’s research and development team has successfully created a "groundbreaking" method for condensing and treating the steam evaporated from its fryers to recover more than 50% of the water used in potato chip manufacturing lines.
"The energy recovered from the condensation can also be used for other manufacturing purposes, such as cooling part of the plant or converting it to electricity, reducing the plant’s energy needs," they say.
PepsiCo has kickstarted using this method at its facility in Kolkata, India, where it showed the approach could save 60 million litres of water a year.
In 2021, the PepsiCo Foundation expanded the reach of its safe water access programme by an additional 8 million people.
Since the effort began in 2006, the company has helped provide safe water access to approximately 68 million people, with a goal of reaching 100 million by 2030. To continue to advance this goal, the Foundation is granting $1.5 million over three years to two new water stewardship programs in Latin America and Nigeria.
For more information on PepsiCo’s sustainability agenda, visit www.pepsico.com/pepsicopositive.
