Industrial water stewardship: An interview with PepsiCo's Liese Dallbauman

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India PepsiCo achieved Positive Water Balance for the first time in 2009, which means the business put back or conserved as much as what was taken out at the country level. 

This feature news is part of Singapore International Water Week’s (SIWW) series of one-on-one interviews with global water industry leaders,  Conversations with Water Leaders . In this edition, Liese Dallbauman, director for Water Stewardship of PepsiCo,   speaks with OOSKAnews correspondent, Renee Martin-Nagle, on industrial water stewardship.

Liese Dallbauman   shares PepsiCo’s initatives on water and energy conservation, improving water use efficiency through achieving Positive Water Balance, managing climate change and more.

PepsiCo managed to reduce water and energy related costs by more than $45 million in 2011 compared to 2006. How did you achieve this feat?

Very good question. We have an in-house tool called ReCon, which is short for Resource Conservation, a software tool which allows us to track where and how a resource is being used by guiding our analysis of the resource and providing a software database for capturing information. ReCon tracks the use of energy, water and production of waste, allowing us to identify where in the plant we are using the resource or generating the waste. To begin, you do a very detailed audit in the plant. Different uses inside the plant have different values attached to them especially with respect to water use. For example, you don’t treat or purify water to wash the floor, so this water is relatively cheap. Water that goes into a boiler has to be softened and heated, so this water is more expensive than the water you use to wash the floor. If you run your boiler more effectively and more efficiently, you will use less fuel and waste less water. Any heating and cooling application where water is involved is a great opportunity to save both water and energy.

PepsiCo is a large organization with over 250,000 employees. How did PepsiCo empower people from the hundreds of PepsiCo beverage and snack plants around the world to be enthusiastic about water?

We have over 300 locations, so we follow a train-the-trainer approach. My group, Global Operations, supports the field by offering tools and training. We do everything we can to accommodate other locations’ schedules and any special needs that they have. The Global Operations Environmental Sustainability team is small — six people. I am the water person. So it is absolutely necessary for us to diffuse the message and let the people in the regions and in the plants take their own approach, which is very different around the world.

It is absolutely necessary for us to diffuse the [conservation] message and let the people in the regions and in the plants take their own approach, which is very different around the world.

Complete Interview and SOURCE
 

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