Water is one of the most used utilities in the food and beverage industry; in some categories, the most used utility. It's both an up-front cost – to buy it – and a downstream cost to treat it after it's been used. Increasing costs at both ends and growing concerns over water's availability are forcing processors to look hard at what once was thought of as cheap utility Liquid Solid Separator.
"Water scarcity is a growing national and global problem," says Mohammad Haghighipodeh, corporate sustainability manager for the Frito-Lay North America division of PepsiCo.
He was in charge of identifying the objectives, technologies, design and proving-out of Frito-Lay's Casa Grande, Ariz., potato chip-making plant. The 28-year-old plant in Arizona's Sonoran Desert is a showcase for many "green" technologies, including solar power, a biomass boiler system that turns solid waste into steam and a plant-wide effort to reduce landfill waste to nearly zero.
A central part of the effort is a total systems approach to water reduction, which results in lower water intake and 75 percent of the process water being reused. The centerpiece is a membrane bioreactor (MBR) and low-pressure reverse-osmosis system. GE Water & Process Technologies, Trevose, Pa., commissioned the MBR portion of the wastewater treatment plant in 2010.
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But an important preliminary step was looking at the process. Frito-Lay engineers redesigned the cooking process for corn used in the tortilla chips in such a way that 40 percent of the water from one batch was left in the tanks for the next batch, saving both water and the energy to heat it.
