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Written by Jennifer Cirillo
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Thursday, 08 July 2010 13:25 |
In a business that relies so heavily on water to produce its products, beverage companies are continuing to put water stewardship at the forefront of their sustainability initiatives.
Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) last month released its 2009 CSR (Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability) report, which highlights five strategic areas of focus, one being water stewardship, and the achievements its made thus far.
At the moment, CCE's global water use ratio, which is the amount of water it takes to produce a unit of beverage measured in liters, is 1.67. "That means it takes 1.67 liters of water to produce one liter of product. The .67 is the piece that is lost in the production process and then the one is the part that is in the product and going out the door," explains Maury Zimring, manager of corporate responsibility and sustainability for CCE. "We've been striving for a water use ratio of 1.3 by the year 2020."
Over the past couple of years, CCE says it has been able to improve its water use ratio by about 3 percent each year and is making efforts to continue to minimize its water use ratio in its bottling plants globally.
One example where many of the company's overall efforts in water stewardship is being applied is at the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Oregon, based in Wilsonville, Ore., which was expanded last month to consolidate three Northwest area facilities located in—Tualatin, Ore., The Dalles, Ore. and Woodland, Wash.
The Wilsonville facility and distribution center has some of the most water-efficient bottling lines within CCE's North America plants. It uses 1.2 liters of water for every one liter of beverage produced. This has been achieved through a number of technologies that CCE has implemented in its bottling plants including dry lube, a silicon-based lubricant to move containers along the production line, air rinsers, which use deionized air instead of water to rinse bottles and preforms and can and bottle warmers where water quality is maintained by using a special chemical so it is replaced less frequently.
"That's going to save us about half-a-million gallons of water a year just in the can warmer," says Wilsonville plant manager Dave Anderson, "and we are getting ready to introduce it into the bottle warmer here shortly."
Outside of the production plant, Wilsonville also recaptures all of its rainwater runoff through a retention pond that can be used for things like irrigation, notes Anderson, and with the recent expansion of the plant, waterless urinals also were installed.
"We are trying to make sure we do the little things within our plants," says Zimring. For instance, CCE circulates water conservation toolkits to help production facility employees better understand where their facility uses water and where water savings can be achieved.
"In general, everybody is looking for ways to either leverage or create new technology," says Fred Roselli, manager of public affairs and communication for CCE. "For us, we are not the first people to use air rinsers or dry lube, but in certain instances we've been able to scale [these technologies] on the enterprise level and that for us is an important part of the process. It's not just, how do we fix one facility's problem? It's, how can we take that facility's problem, extrapolate it over a longer term and see where this fits in for our overall system."
From Beverage World July 15, 2010
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