Today’s Agriculture into Consumer Products

Even before this weekend’s Earth Hour encouraging people to switch off their lights around the globe for one hour and commit to additional energy saving actions, there has been a lot of talk about how humans can become more self sustainable by using our natural resources more viably; in our daily lives with our daily products. Pepsi is one company striving to improve sustainability with innovative technology leveraging agricultural products.

In America, 1500 plastic water bottles are consumed every second. Pepsi has taken a charge at creating a greener water bottle containing renewable materials as switch grass, pine barks and corn husks. PepsiCo hopes to make future versions of the bottle with orange peels, potato peels, oat hulls and other agricultural byproducts from its foods business.

PepsiCo plans to make several hundred thousand bottles in a pilot program next year and roll them out more widely later. They have not stated which brands will get the bottle first. But PepsiCo did say the undercover research and development project spanned four countries and took several years.

“We’re learning our way,” said Denise Lefebvre, senior director of advanced research at PepsiCo. “We want to make sure all the science is absolutely right.” PepsiCo says the bottle looks and feels like existing beverage containers, and protects beverages equally well.

“The beauty of the technology is, we’ll be able to use a lot of different types of biomass,” said Lefebvre. “Our intent is certainly to create a closed-loop system.”

The PlantBottle technology will also appear in Heinz bottles, under a partnership with the ketchup-maker, and possibly in bottles for Honest Tea, a Maryland company Coca-Cola just acquired. The PlantBottle is made partly with natural sugars found in sugarcane ethanol from Brazil. Odwalla, a Coca-Cola juice brand, plans to switch to the PlantBottle within the next few weeks. If you would like to read more about this visit PepsiCo. Source: LA Times.

Technology is helping humans create a use for agricultural products other than for feeding the world. A more sustainable world is created through agriculture with modern technology. Here at AGCO, we are working to create clarity of that vision by measuring our sustainability initiatives and helping farmers pioneer the future in agriculture with improvements in technology.

Do you know of some other ways technology is being used to develop new consumer products from agriculture?