Food for thought - Pepsi’s Tropicana finds its carbon footrpint
I previously blogged about PepsiCo and their Green vending machines; this article is about another of their green initiatives - life cycle carbon footprint for PepsiCo owned Tropicana Pure Premium Oranage Juice. It was concluded that a 200mL glass of Tropicana has a carbon footprint of 180g of CO2-equivalent. That amount is similar to driving 720 metres in a compact car or using 11443.7 staples! Although it may not sound a lot (the driving analogy), think about how many people drink orange juice each morning!
What is a “life cycle” carbon footprint for a product? They are also called “cradle to grave” carbon footprint, which literally means the accounting of carbon for a product starting from raw material and (usually) end in the landfill. Using the Pure Premium organe juice as an example, the life cycle carbon footprint would include carbon associated with:
- Growing the oranges
- Harvesting and transporting oranges to be processed
- Processing of the oranges to orange juice
- Bottling orange juice
- Tranporting “made’ orange juice to grocery stores
- Transporting orange juice to households
- Disposing of orange juice boxes
You get the idea. Personally I like the idea of product life cycle carbon footprint, as long as the boundary is set properly. In this case, we don’t really know what the boundary is because I don’t have the actual study. I think that PepsiCo has decided not to include the carbon footprint assocaited with producing the juice box, but the disposal of the juice box is included in the carbon footprint. The problem with that is that if there is a life cycle carbon footprint analysis done on the juice box, then the disposal of the juice box would be counted twice, which would not be correct. How to fix this problem? Well, in an ideal world where all products needs a carbon label, there’d be regulations (one’d hope). This is just a really small problem in this case which may happen in other cases, but the bottom line is that this is great and I hope more and more products having life cycle carbon footprint and creating carbon labels!
By the way - 60% of the life cycle carbon footprint is from juice production (not surprising), but 58% of the 60% (or 34.8% overall) of the life cycle carbon footprint is from growing the oranges (more surprising)! I’ll have to look for other examples but that’s quite significant if it is the benchmark for most processed food products!
So what is PepsiCo doing with the result of the life cycle analysis? They have started looking into alternative approach to growing the oranges, they’re even considering organic approach since it can reduce the fertilizer usage and thus the ccarbon footprint! Of course it’s not that easy - growing orange oranically will likely reduce yield and thus increasing carbo nassicated with irrigation, transportation, and so on…. What else is PepsiCo doing? They will be releasing carbon footprint for several other products in the near future!
Tags: carbon footprint, climate change, Climate Change Tool, food carbon footprint, green companies
Big Green Big Deal, Population and climate change | flo | 
April 28, 2009 12:37 am
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