Drinks giant seeks to use GE’s non-thermal brine concentration to help reduce waste water in sanitisation processes.

As a major drinks manufacturer, PepsiCo is more than aware of the risks that water stresses such as drought and pollution can have on its supply chain and business.

Speaking to BusinessGreen, PepsiCo’s director of sustainable development, Dan Bena, said the company was already investing heavily in identifying problem areas and cutting water use.

However, he now hopes to develop a more sophisticated approach to water stewardship, including using new technology and taking a more regional approach to resource efficiency.

Bena revealed that PepsiCo is ahead of schedule for meeting its goal of reducing water use by 20 per cent between 2006 and 2015, having this year broken through the 19 per cent reduction mark following a range of initiatives such as a partnership with Nature Conservancy, focusing on improving its operation in Mexico, the US, China, the UK and India.

However, Bena said that instead of increasing the global target beyond 20 per cent, PepsiCo is developing a new strategy that will impose different goals at different sites depending on the water stress levels of that region.

“A company-wide goal is crucial when starting a journey that could be important for motivating employees,” he said. “However, from a business perspective it doesn’t make sense to herd together facilities in water-abundant areas with those in water-stressed areas.”

Unlike the uniformity of carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere, the availability of water varies greatly from place to place as it gathers in local watersheds. And the work with Nature Conservancy has helped PepsiCo identify those places where water risks appear to be moderate or high.

The company currently has five pilot watershed studies underway, including one in the UK, that will examine water budgets, assess the sustainability of water use and design watershed conservation activities that can improve water availability and quality.

Efforts have included irrigation system improvements and upgrades, municipal groundwater mitigation, waste water reuse and rainwater harvesting.

Noting that close to half of PepsiCo’s facilities are in areas suffering from water stress, Bena said the strategy will focus on installing new technology to reduce consumption.

For example, he is keen to use a technology developed by General Electric, known as non-thermal brine concentration, which could reduce the amount of water wasted when sanitising water.

Bena said PepsiCo is already working with GE and Siemens to halve the water wasted in reverse-osmosis processes, from 20 per cent to 10 per cent, but he hoped non-thermal brine concentration could reduce waste to as low as one per cent.

Given that PepsiCo used 106 billion litres of water in 2010, of which 68 billion were from the North and South America food and beverage businesses and the remainder for the rest of the world, you can start to understand the scale of waste water that kind of technology could save.

“Once a pilot study is done, and if it is economically proven, then we would love to use it,” he said.

According to Nature Conservancy, the future for water availability is looking rather bleak. Virtually all reports and forecasts suggest the global water crisis will only get worse. Global water use doubled between 1951 and 2002, and is expected to keep climbing as populations increase.

Nearly three billion people now live in river basins with “severe” water scarcity during at least part of the year, and a substantial portion of the global population has an increasingly uncertain availability of water for drinking, bathing, growing food and generating electricity.

Last year, PepsiCo unveiled a set of global goals based on the premise that it will respect the human right to water through efficiency in its operations, preserving water resources and enabling access to safe water.

But despite its successes in cutting water use so far, the company has considered whether some water-stressed regions may no longer be suitable for hosting facilities.

As a business accountable to its financial stakeholders, such a move would present further social and economic dilemmas. Should PepsiCo move out of a region to help improve the environment, while at the same time removing the economic benefit that plant gives to the region?

Bena says that if or when PepsiCo reaches such a crossroads, it would aim to compromise by switching the purpose of the facility.

“I spoke personally to the CEO about this four years ago, and she said we would move a facility, but there was a caveat [that] we had to carry out due diligence on the economic and social effects,” he said.

“Instead of moving a plant, it may be more a case of transforming a plant so it becomes a warehouse instead of a facility.”