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Home > Environment > Clean and green

Clean and green

PBG has an excellent record for providing consumers with safe, reliable and great-tasting beverages–invigorating energy drinks, refreshing carbonated soft drinks and hydrating beverages that promote health and wellness. PBG attributes much of this success to its selection of high-quality ingredients and packaging. But that's only part of the story. The rest takes place in PBG plants, where the bottling process adheres to cleanliness standards that some might call extreme, but which the company and its workers see as required. The traditional methods of meeting such standards require thousands of gallons of water per plant, per day to rinse bottles and sanitize production lines. Recent breakthroughs, however, have enabled the company to maintain its uncompromising commitment to product quality and safety while also dramatically reducing water usage and energy consumption.

Beyond squeaky clean

Imagine that you wanted to wash a mixing spoon using PBG methods. Under the original system, you'd start by rinsing the spoon with room-temperature water for 5-10 minutes.

Then you'd spray it with a mixture of detergent and 140°F water for 20 minutes. After that, you'd rinse the spoon with room-temperature water until all residual detergent is gone.

Next, you'd heat that room-temperature water up to 180°F for 15 minutes. After that, you'd give the spoon a final rinse with room-temperature water until the spoon was cooled down.

There's no question this method worked, but PBG's quality team knew there had to be a way to achieve the same level of sanitization without using so much water and energy. So it challenged the suppliers of cleansing solutions to come up with a way that would eliminate the second, room-temperature rinse and reduce the amount of energy needed to reheat the water and equipment after the rinse. And they did, by developing products that allow sanitization to start directly after the cleaning cycle.

Today, PBG has converted about 78 percent of its bottling lines to the new process, reducing the process from five steps to three, and saving about a thousand gallons of water with each cycle, which sometimes occurs as often as once a day. The total savings amounts to 20 million gallons each year. The new process also cuts energy consumption by about eight billion BTUs a year, mainly in natural gas consumption—yet another way PBG is reducing its carbon footprint. (For more about how PBG saves energy and reduces emissions, see the story "Lightening up" in this section.)

Water-free cleaning

Another way that PBG maintains product quality is by rinsing the inside of bottles and cans before they're filled to make sure they are free of particles before filling with product. But that, too, can use a lot of water.

The alternative? Blasting high-pressure, ionized air into each container. By ionizing the air, static charges that can make dust and debris cling to the inside of a container are neutralized. Particles float free and are blown out with the air.

Like so many solutions, however, air rinsing does come with trade-offs.

For example, while water consumption goes down, electricity consumption goes up, due to the power needed to run the compressors that maintain pressure in the air-rinsing systems. Careful analysis must be done to determine the most efficient option, which depends in part on the mix of products being manufactured.

At an increasing number of plants, air rinsing is getting the nod. Where air rinsing isn't a practical solution, other measures are being used to conserve water. At PBG's Phoenix plant, for example, rinse water is recovered and recycled for other needs, such as washing equipment or cooling the plant's refrigeration system. And at PBG's largest plant in Toronto, the company is installing new production lines that will eliminate the need for rinsing millions of bottles each day. As described in the story "Winning by losing" in this section, the plant will soon begin making its own bottles and coupling the process with filling to eliminate the need to rinse.

Whatever the rinsing method, the goal is the same: safe, quality products in every container that PBG manufactures and markets, achieved in a way that upholds the company's high environmental standards.

Every drop counts

As PBG Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations, Victor Crawford is looking for ways to conserve water. He readily admits that the task is getting harder as the largest and most obvious improvements are made. But he knows more opportunities exist.

To help find them, PBG has been dispatching a team of independent consultants to move into its plants for two weeks at a time, scrutinize every aspect of its operations and recommend water conservation methods.

“The key will be making incremental changes that eventually yield significant impacts,” notes Crawford. “It may be as simple as installing a self-closing valve on a water faucet or finding faster ways to detect leaks.”

“Every gallon counts,” he adds. “Plant by plant, community by community and country by country, we owe it to ourselves and to society to use every drop as responsibly as we can.”

Reducing and reusing

At PBG headquarters in Somers, N.Y., an on-site greywater system recycles 15-20 percent of the building's water, which comes from an on-site water well. By recycling the water, PBG conserves water and reduces its electricity usage.