Environmental Leader

After improving energy efficiency at about 130 North American Pepsi facilities, PepsiCo International has extended the same energy saving ethos to facilities in China, Chile and Brazil.

Pepsi is using using technology from Orion Energy Systems Inc. to  improve lighting efficiency, according to a press release. The bottler installed high-intensity fluorescent lighting that should reduce energy waste by 50 percent while providing 50 percent more light.

The Nanching, China, facility is estimated to save 202,000 kilowatt hours a year, as opposed to using a different type of lighting.

The Santiago, Chile, bottling plant will reduce its lighting electricity consumption to about 106,000 kWh, compared to 335,000 kWh previously.

As an example of the same thinking in the U.S., PepsiAmericas installed intelligent occupancy sensors on 155 Orion Compact Modular fixtures at a production and warehouse facility in Reserve, La. Because of the effort, an estimated 545,000 kilowatt-hours will be saved.

In other energy saving initiatives at Pepsi, the company is using a natural gas heat and power system to bottle beverages at its plant in Queens, NY – saving a potential $408,000 a year.

Competing soft drink bottlers are taking steps to make their international bottling plants energy efficient too.

Coca-Cola Hellenic and ContourGlobal have opened an advanced energy-saving power plant in Romania as part of an initiative to cut annual CO2 emissions across all of Coca-Cola Hellenic’s operations by more than 20 percent. The initiative supports the European Commission’s goal to meet a 20 percent reduction in emissions by 2020.

A Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant, constructed in partnership with power development company ContourGlobal, is installed at the Coca-Cola Hellenic bottling facility in Ploiesti.

This is the first of 15 plants that the company plans to build in 12 countries, including eight European Union member states. Coca-Cola Hellenic is one of the largest bottlers of Coca-Cola products in the world.