PepsiCo – Brenda Meany – 2017

Goals

PepsiCo North America Beverages (NAB) has set industry-leading targets for environmental sustainability through its Performance with Purpose (PwP) goals. But for several business areas, getting the best financial and environmental impact return requires prioritizing where resources should be allocated. EDF Climate Corps fellow Brenda Meany was enlisted to focus on: warehouse carbon emissions assessment, plant wastewater risk assessment and food waste characterization.

Solutions

• Warehouse Emissions: Meany collected and analyzed energy use across a subset of warehouses. She identified using the utility bills generated from the energy management system as the most accurate reporting method.
• Wastewater: Meany created a database of all the wastewater permits, sampling methods and billing data. The database can be used to identify plants at risk for compliance and prioritize plants to target for best practice measurement improvements.
• Food Waste: Meany collected volumes and reuse destinations for solid and liquid food waste. Using this information, she developed a food waste baseline, which identified the highest areas of food waste and estimated the carbon impacts of the reuse destination. After identifying animal feed as an economically and environmentally positive option for reducing food waste, Meany suggested sending waste to animal feed, followed by anaerobic digestion. Guidelines were written to ensure the safety of animals and humans consuming PepsiCo food products down the supply chain.

Potential Impact

Moving forward, the Engineering Sustainability team plans to allocate resources based on the findings from the three projects. The new warehouse reporting method will allow PepsiCo to prioritize sites for LED lighting upgrades based on total utility usage and cost. When implemented, LED upgrades could annually save kWh, significant savings in utility costs, metric tons of CO2 emissions, and contribute a significant impact annually to the PwP goal to reduce carbon emissions across NAB. The wastewater database will inform decisions around the most economical way to deal with the organic material going down the drain. PepsiCo now has a prioritized business sector to concentrate on for the reduction of food waste in order to meet PwP goals. By sending waste to animal feed, PepsiCo can offset a large amount of GHGs while potentially seeing financial returns.