Tropicana: Trying to Make a Greener Orange Juice

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 lbs. of CO2. What was particularly surprising was where much of that CO2 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 being 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 so 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.” (See the top 10 green ideas of 2009.). More…

News selected by Covalence | Country: Nigeria | Company — Ethical Quote link: PepsiCo | Source: Time