A March issue of Time magazine featured an article about Pepsi-Co company looking for ways to reduce it’s carbon footprint, specifically with its Tropicana brand. They found that producing the popular orange juice wasn’t very environmentally friendly and I’m sure the marketing guru’s got to thinking about how great it would be to have “green” orange juice. After evaluating the carbon footprint of production they found that the most energy used was on production of fertilizer for the trees. Surprising, right? Especially when you consider how much energy is used in factories and transportation of the juice. I know tractor-trailers aren’t the most fuel- efficient automobiles but honestly fertilizer? It turns out it was the type of fertilizer being used and it’s production process that was so ungreen. Pepsi-co uses a special nitrogen fertilizer and citrus trees require a lot of fertilizer to ensure a plentiful crop. No surprise there right corporations always want to make lots 0′ money. Well now they are looking into greener fertilizers and have hired two companies to help them do so. One of the companies Outlook Resources is using organic and renewable feedstocks to create it’s fertilizer i.e. biochar and they are hoping that it benefits crop yields as it has done for other types of farming. I know you all are familiar with biochar and how it’s production process has low carbon emissions or none so we don’t have to get into the environmental benfits but if this is successful it could mean a revolution for agriculture in the U.S and similar to what is occurring in Australia. I’m not always the biggest fan of corporations but cheers to Pepsi-co for at least realizing there are other options out there.
Read the full article from Time here.
Tags: biochar, biochar gardener, biochar projects, clean energy, experiment, Social Change
