Tropicana: Trying to Make a Greener Orange Juice
By Bryan Walsh Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010
How green is your orange juice? A couple of years ago, PepsiCo, which owns the orange-juice brand Tropicana, tried to size up the carbon footprint of the popular morning tonic. It found that each half-gallon carton of OJ is responsible for 3.75 lb. of CO
2.
What was particularly surprising was where much of that CO
2 was coming from. The single biggest contributor to Tropicana's carbon footprint wasn't the transport of the juice to stores or the energy required to operate a modern citrus farm. Rather, it was the fertilizer used to grow the orange trees. A great deal of natural gas is used to make nitrogen fertilizer, and a great deal of fertilizer is used on citrus trees — so much that fertilizer accounted for 35%, the largest share, of the carbon footprint of orange juice. "We thought it might be transport or packaging," says Tim Carey, director of sustainability and beverages for PepsiCo. "But the agricultural aspects of the operation are more important than we expected."
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1945379_1944307,00.html">(See the top 10 green ideas of 2009.)
To make a greener orange juice, PepsiCo needed a greener fertilizer — and that's exactly what the company is experimenting with. Working with a pair of agricultural companies — Yara International and Colorado-based Outlook Resources — PepsiCo will test low-carbon fertilizers at one of its producer farms in Bradenton, Fla. If successful, the greener fertilizers could lower the carbon footprint of PepsiCo's citrus growers by as much as 50% and reduce the total carbon footprint of Tropicana orange juice by up to 20%. Given how much fertilizer is used throughout the U.S. farming system as a whole — more than 13 million tons of nitrogen in 2007 alone — a greener way to help plants grow could put a serious dent in U.S. carbon emissions.
Inorganic nitrogen fertilizer — the sort used by most farms in the U.S. — is made through the Haber-Bosch process, which fixes nitrogen to make ammonia, which is then used to make the nitrates and other chemicals that feed plant growth. It requires a lot of natural gas to help make the ammonia; agriculture eats up as much as 5% of global natural-gas consumption. As a fossil fuel, natural gas has a high carbon content, which means nitrogen fertilizer has it too. (Conventional fertilizer also releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that has about 300 times the warming power of CO
2.) The need for natural gas also puts a strain on farmers; fertilizer prices are closely linked to natural-gas costs, leaving farmers vulnerable to huge price swings, especially if gas begins to be used more frequently for electricity. "It's something we always have to worry about," says Mac Carraway, who runs SMR Farms in Bradenton, which is hosting PepsiCo's fertilizer trial.
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