Food for thought - Frito Lay’s Chip Tracker for locally grown potatos

Frito Lay’s (owned by PepsiCo) has launched a new campaign to show that 80 local farmers from 27 states grow the potatoes used to make its chips.  Better yet, they are trackable - US only (For Lay’s Chips in Canada, apparently all chips are made with Canadian potatoes - we’re talking 16,000 acres spread over 7 provinces including Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and PEI ).  On the tracker website, you can check where the bag of the Lay’s Classic Chips is made by putting in your zip code and the first 3 digits of the product code on the bag.  For a company that purchased 2.8 billion pounds of potatoes from US farmers in 2008, it’s pretty amazing that they take the time to launching such a campaign! The campaign is not without its criticisms - most of the specialty chips are made from only a few plants and are not trackable. I wonder what is the breakdown of the flavour of Lay’s Chips sold in US?  If you can find the stats, please let me know!

Personally I like this type of marketing, it gets people thinking about where do our food come from and what is the environmental impact of taking food far far away from home. But does it make you buy more chips if you know it’s made locally? Anyway, expect to see displays of this campaign in 40,000 stores in the US and several TV ads real soon!

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!

Food for thought - reducing rice carbon footprint seminar

I’m still stunned with the carbon footprint relating to rice production.  I had a few discussions with friends and family and I need to find out how to deal with this - because I simply can’t not eat rice….  

Found out that there’ll be a seminar on April 29^th, 2009 on “reducing carbon footprint of rice production” by Korean scholar Won Kyo Jung at the School of Environment & Natural Resources at the Ohio State University.  Here is the poster.  I’d like to know more about it.. will try get in touch with the organizer see if i can conference in.  I can update on what I find out.

Food for thought - carbon footprint of rice

Since I started reading about meats and their carbon footprints, I figured I should check the carbon footprint for some of my favourite food.  I grew up eating rice, so I googled rice carbon footprint.  It was a huge surprirse to me when I found out that rice has a much higher carbon footprint comparing to beef on the same weight basis.  According to this article, rice contributes 24 times more greenhouse gases to the environment than even beef and per pound rice is equivalent of 276  5 to 35? pounds of CO2-equivilant! NOTE: the author of the above mentioned article has had several discussions with readers to verify the actual CO2-equivalent figures based o n various literature sources. In one discussion he realizes that the calculation was off by 100 times, but does not believe that a number approximately 1000x smaller is the “right” number. Follow his discussions here. There has yet to be a conclusion - the number he still believed would to be 5 and 35 lbs of CO2-equivalent per lb rice produced. Something I should really look into as well…..

It might be one thing to stop eating beef, but it’s not really possible for me to stop eating rice!!  

So why does rice have such a high carbon footprint?  It is because methane is produced during flooded rice cultivation by the decomposition of organic matter in the soil.  Details to the carbon footprint of rice cultivation can be found in the agriculture section of the 2009 Draft U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report.

So what can we do?  Apparently the most significant factor for methane release is related to the amount of water that the rice is grown under!  In some areas where rice fields are not flooded, no methane is created!  Similarly, if the water level is more than 1m (so called deepwater rice fields), methane production is also limited.  In other words, if rice production is from shallow flooding (which is most of the case), then the amount of methane and therefore its carbon footprint is much much more significant.  

As someone growing up eating rice, most of the time I am quite picky about the type of rice (long grain, short grain, and so on) than the type of rice farming!  I will need to do a bit more research to find out the carbon footprint of my favourite type of rice…