Doing the Last Experiment First to be 'Greener'

Years ago I spent some brief time working at Frito-Lay's research facility, and my boss, Dr. Dennis Heard, Sr. Vice President of R&D, used to say, "we need to do the last experiment first."  Initially I had no idea what he was talking about, but I learned that it's really a pretty common-sense approach to formal testing.

For example, for three new products, you could test them in three different cities, and then launch them together, nationally, only to end up with different national results than you found in the three test markets.  Instead, by "doing the last experiment first," you would test all three of these products together in one market, so that you could observe their interaction.  It makes perfect sense, but most companies don't do it, because of the complexity to pull it off.

So Dennis (who is retired now) will be pleased to know that our manufacturing plants are “doing the last experiment first” and bringing together many of our environmental sustainability initiatives for water, energy and landfill waste reduction and kicking-off Phase One of a three-phase project, by breaking ground at our Casa Grande, Ariz., plant to build a new water processing and filtration system. 

The idea is to bring three different technologies together at Casa Grande, making sure that they are commercially viable on a large scale -- and then we would take the learnings and apply them to our other 30-plus manufacturing sites as appropriate.

Last month I blogged about some of our current water conservation efforts, but the Casa Grande program significantly magnifies our efforts, as the system will be able to reduce water consumption by 80-85 percent – that could be over 400,000 gallons of water a day!

 "We're using the same technology to recycle water as municipalities like San Diego are using," says Dr. Adam Warren, Senior Engineer, Sustainability & Productivity, (pictured at left, photo compliments of Al Goodman from CDM) who is heading-up the program at Casa Grande.  "Only this will be the first large-scale application in the food industry."

"Today at Casa we reuse the waste water in a field to grow alfalfa – a process that used to be considered state-of-the-art," Adam says.  "With the new technology, we'll use what is called a membrane bioreactor -- MBR for short -- to filter the water and bring it up to EPA standards for drinking water, so we can re-use it in the plant."

In Phase Two, we plan to install solar panels to create electricity to help power the Casa Grande plant. We're also implementing an aggressive landfill reduction program that I wrote about recently. 

And in Phase Three, we plan to construct a biomass boiler to produce steam from tree trimmings, pecan shells and other woody waste, further expanding our energy conservation efforts.

Our Casa Grande plant's sustainability projects are a major step forward in our work to conserve and preserve our planet.  But as I learned from Dennis, a side benefit of "doing the last experiment first" is that you learn things you would never have known otherwise. 

I believe that at Casa Grande, we'll find that the interaction of our sustainability technologies will lead to even more innovations that help us on our journey to becoming a "preeminent green" company.  In future posts, I'll keep you up-to-speed on Adam and the Operations team's progress at the Casa Grande plant.  What are you doing to conserve and preserve at home or at work? 

Comments

[Andress Koenning]

Dave, this is great info on Frito Lay. At United Way we are doing everything we can to conserve energy and help the environment. Small steps like turning lights out and recycling paper have made a big impact! Thanks!