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Kettle Foods Builds Green: First LEED Gold Food Plant!
Focus business partner Kettle Foods has combined wind turbines and native prairie grasses with America's favorite snack, potato chips, earning recognition for building the greenest food manufacturing plant in the U.S.in Beloit Wisconsin."Investing in green building was a conscious decision on our part to demonstrate our values in a very tangible way," said Tim Fallon, president of Kettle Foods North America. "Our employees have always encouraged us to look at ways to minimize our impact on the environment - from rooftop solar power panels to biodiesel fuel from our used cooking oil. Sustainable initiatives are business as usual at Kettle Foods."
With close proximity to the rich potato farms of America's heartland, Beloit, Wis. was a natural choice for Kettle Foods' second U.S. potato chip factory. The new 73,000 square foot plant met ambitious green-building standards with:
- Installation of 18 wind turbines on the factory's roof, which will generate enough energy to produce 56,000 bags of chips annually
- Filtering and reusing 3.40 million gallons of potato wash water
- Installing premium, high efficiency equipment to reduce the use of natural gas and electricity
- Offsetting 100 percent of electricity use with renewable wind power
- Converting used cooking oil into biodiesel
- Dedicating five acres to restoration of native prairie land
- Sourcing over 35 percent of building materials from within 500 miles of the project site
- Protecting indoor air quality with Green Seal building material and extensive ventilation for fresh air
- Providing quality work environments with natural light and outdoor views for all levels of workers
- "Kettle Foods is setting a new standard for sustainable food manufacturing in the U.S.," said Connie Lindholm, Executive Director, Wisconsin Green Building Alliance. "It's demonstrating through action commitment to the environment that goes far deeper than its leadership in the natural food industry. We hope other businesses look to Kettle Foods as an inspiration for their own facilities."
Adopting sustainable business practices is a norm for Kettle Foods, whose popular all natural Kettle(tm) brand Potato Chips account for nearly half the growth of the premium potato chip category. In 2006 Kettle Foods blew off conventional energy, offsetting 100 percent of its annual electricity use with renewable wind power and eliminating more than 16 million pounds of carbon dioxide pollution (CO2), the major contributing cause of global warming. The company also captures the power of the sun to generate 130,000 kilowatt hours of solar energy annually at its Salem, Ore., headquarters. Additional long-standing commitments include recycling used cooking oil into biodiesel, solar power, wildlife habitat restoration on its properties, and "chipping in" to local communities with over 300,000 pounds of potatoes and chips annually.
Feeding the Bugs!
WALK THE TALK in nature, as Paul Hawken pointed out in The Ecology of Commerce, “all waste is food”. That principal is a key element in redesigning business practices for sustainability, closing the loop, and insuring that waste products are transformed into inputs for productive activity. For the last four years, Focus the Nation partner KETTLE FOODS has been showing that “waste food” can again become food—in this case, for three diesel hungry VW Bugs. Kettle converts used chip oil into biodiesel to fuel their small company fleet.
Kettle Foods uses a lot of cooking oil to make a wide variety of roasted nuts and nut mixes and of course to make Kettle™ brand Potato Chips. The company uses the oil as efficiently as possible, and then, for over 25 years had always recycled their used cooking oil to the rendering industry to make things like soap and candles. Used cooking oil was considered a waste product and Kettle had to pay to have it hauled away. However a few years ago they learned of another—and better—use for their used cooking oil: biodiesel.Biodiesel is fuel that can be made from any edible oil and it can be used in any diesel engine. There are several advantages for biodiesel over regular diesel:
Most important, biodiesel made from waste oil dramatically reduces global warming pollution relative to petroleum-based diesel.
In 2003 Kettle Foods began a program where all of their used cooking oil goes to a local producer who turns it into biodiesel. Then the company powers three cars and a delivery truck on it. It is largely a “closed loop” system: used cooking oil comes back to the company to fuel for their cars. Kettle has the advantage that SEQUENTIAL PACIFIC BIOFUELS has a production facility very near the kettle production plant in Salem, OR. Learn more about Kettle Food’s sustainability efforts and see a picture of the three biodiesel powered VW Beetles.When you vote with dollars, Climate Counts!
Thanks to Focus sponsor, STONYFIELD FARM, we all have a new weapon against global warming: our pocketbook. Stonyfield recently launched CLIMATE COUNTS a new non-profit organization that brings consumers and companies together in the fight against global climate change. The organization provides consumers with an objective, balanced way to gauge which companies are seriously committed to reversing climate change—and which ones aren’t. They created a tool—the Climate Counts Company Scorecard—that rates companies annually on their practices to reduce global warming. It is easy to use, allowing all of us to make better informed shopping and investing decisions.Many companies today are jumping on the green bandwagon to demonstrate their commitment to the environment. But how can consumers be assured those companies are following through, specifically with respect to fighting climate change?
To help answer this question, Climate Counts designed and executed a rigorous scoring process that screens publicly available information on each company against 22 criteria drawn from other climate and corporate performance tools. They use these criteria to measure the following four key benchmarks:
- How well does the company MEASURE its climate “footprint”?
- How much has the company done to REDUCE its global warming pollution?
- Does the company explicitly SUPPORT (or suggest a desire to block) progressive climate legislation?
- How clearly and comprehensively does the company publicly DISCLOSE its climate protection efforts?
To date, Climate Counts has scored 56 companies in eight major consumer sectors, such as Electronics, Household Products, and Apparel. Check out the scores, and see if they change the way you vote with your dollars.
Recycle!
How is recycling a global warming solutions? Bottom-line: less energy used, less global warming pollution emitted. Reducing material use is always the best choice, then re-use, then recycling. But recycling is critical. Recycled paper, for example, requires less than 80% of the energy to manufacture than from using virgin materials; plastics require only 25%, and aluminum 10%.
Focus the Nation business sponsor, RECYCLED PAPER PRINTING, INC. is truly a pioneer. The company was the first in the nation to print solely on recycled paper, building their customer base and supply relations from the ground up. As the company puts it: “We helped create the market that created the demand that created the supply that fuels the consumption of the papers you recycle!” more
The recycling industry is a good model showing how fast clean technologies can spread—with a boost from smart government policy. As mandatory curbside recycling expanded the feedstock of used paper, recycling mills began boosting supply. But it took entreprenuerial firms like Recycled Paper to build the final link to consumer demand, creating the paths to profitability that other companies soon followed. In clean energy, efficiency, local foods, and biofuels today, companies are beginning to build these same pathways.
The Latest Diet? Low Carbon.
When thinking about carbon footprints, most of us don’t consider what is on the dinner table. But we should. By a recent measure, Americans emit more global warming pollution from eating then they do from driving! Focus the Nation sponsor Bon Appetit Management Company is helping educate students, staff and faculty across the country about food impacts on global warming with their LOW CARBON DIET.
BON APPETIT operates over 400 cafés in corporations, universities and specialty venues nationwide, and the Low Carbon Diet will encourage chefs and diners to think about how their food choices could help ease the climate crisis. “It is insane to sit down to lunch in Los Angeles and drink water that has traveled 5,000 miles from Fiji,” said Helene York, director of the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation, the program’s organizer. “We are scrutinizing our own food habits to reduce our carbon footprint as a company, and we are helping our guests do the same on an individual level.”
Elements of the Low Carbon Diet:
- Reducing the use of beef by 25% — Livestock production is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions.
- Sourcing all meat and poultry from North America — 80% of the energy used by the food system comes not from growing food, but from transporting and processing it.
- Sourcing nearly all fruits and vegetables from North America, using seasonal local produce as a first preference and using tropical fruits only as “special occasion” ingredients — Most bananas have traveled 3,000 miles in high-speed refrigerated ships to reach an American breakfast plate. A local apple might be grown within 10 miles.
- Serving only domestic bottled water and reducing waste from plastic bottles — Americans throw away 40 million plastic water bottles every day.
Solar Solutions
If there is a magic bullet that can stabilize the climate, it will be cheap solar energy from photovoltaic cells. Solar electric prices have been coming down fast, and many people believe that with a few billion dollars of additional investment, they can cross the line that will lead towards rapid commercialization. In 2005, Focus the Nation partner
STONYFIELD FARM installed a 50 kilowatt (kW) solar energy system atop its New Hampshire manufacturing facility. The array is the largest in the state and one of the largest in New England.Why is this kind of early investment critical? Growing the market for solar cells allows the industry to gain economies of scale, and “learn by doing”. Both of these factors, along with continued investment in basic R&D, can help bring costs down fast. In the Northeast, if you factor in incentives, solar cells are sound economic investments—with PAYBACK PERIODS ranging from 5-13 years.
When today’s college kids turn fifty, the job of their generation will be to rewire the entire planet with technologies like solar cells, and cut global warming pollution by 15% per decade. Thanks to early investors like Stonyfield, the costs of solar cells are dropping, and with some hard work on our part, our kids will have the affordable tools they need to carbon-neutralize the whole world when their own children are starting college.
Offsets—are they for real?
You bet. Here's how CLIF BAR'S COOL TAGS program works. For each Cool Tag sold, CLIF BAR invests $2 in NativeEnergy’s WindBuilders program, helping to build new wind projects like the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s Wind Farm in South Dakota and other projects supporting family farmers and isolated Native Alaskan villages. Wind farms deliver clean, renewable energy to the grid without releasing CO2 into the air—thereby displacing energy that comes from polluting facilities. Every Cool Tag keeps an estimated 300 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2)—the main contributor to global warming—out of the air. That’s roughly the same as neutralizing the global warming emissions generated from traveling 300 miles in the average car.
The key to a real offset is that it must create “additional” clean energy—not just pad the profits of a wind project that was going to get built anyway. By working through NativeEnergy, consumers are assured that their Cool Tag dollars are really making new wind power happen. Offsets can’t stop global warming, but they do mobilize capital for innovative technology solutions that, in the long run, will provide the critical tools our children are going to need. Bottom line—try to reduce unnecessary travel, and when you do travel, go by the most efficient means possible (for short trips, trains are much better then planes; single occupancy vehicle cars are about the same as planes). Finally, when you travel, offset your emissions through a reliable source, like COOL TAGS