PepsiCo UK collaborates with wider food industry to identify and curb farming greenhouse gas emissions
The Sustainable Food Lab, together with the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI), have launched a new project that brings together key members of the food and drink industry to jointly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their farming practices.
28 April 2010
The Global Agriculture Climate Assessment project aims to empower food companies to engage their agriculture suppliers; assessing the barriers faced by farmers and identifying the solutions required to efficiently address the climate impacts from agriculture.
At PepsiCo, we are piloting the "Cool Farm Tool" with some of our potato growers. Our trials have found it to be an effective tool to determine the carbon footprint of farming systems. This helps us to develop agricultural practices that emit less GHGs. The "Cool Farm Tool" GHG calculator was developed by researchers at the University of Aberdeen.
We reported back about our experiences through our Global Sustainable Agriculture Council and at the last SAI Platform meeting.
Mark Pettigrew, Agricultural Development Manager for PepsiCo in Europe, comments:
"Growers understand the need for lower carbon farming - especially in relation to PepsiCo's objectives - but lack the necessary tool to measure emissions at a farm level for specific crop production. The Cool Farm Tool provides this and has the benefit of being user friendly, can be used for modelling and provides the carbon footprint there and then.
"Growers can take responsibility for their own carbon management with the Carbon Footprint Tool."
As part of the project, PepsiCo will engage its potato growers to understand how best to reduce their environmental impact. Uniquely, the project coordinates the evaluation of multiple different farming systems to ensure that each is robustly examined and similar baselines and assumptions and baselines taken.
The growing of raw materials (potatoes, sunflowers and seasoning) is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions when producing a packet of Walkers Crisps - accounting for 44% of its total carbon footprint. The project, which is global in scope, will continue for 12 - 18 months and investigate the greenhouse gas emission of different farming systems (e.g. potatoes).
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