Alberta’s food-processing industry is out to improve its bottom line, enhance competitiveness and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
And do it all at the same time.
Thirty-four companies — from “mom and pop” bakeries to giant food corporations — are participating in a unique pilot project launched by the Alberta Food Processors Association (AFPA). The goal is ambitious: reduce the companies’ energy usage and associated emissions blamed for global warming by at least 25 per cent.
“The initial results are very positive,” says AFPA president Ken Gibson.
“We should be able to hit an overall 25-per-cent reduction, not necessarily for each company, but over the entire group of them.”
That would add up to total energy savings of more than $6 million a year for participating companies. Their combined greenhouse gas emission reductions would total more than 80,000 tonnes a year.
The project is completely driven by the food processing industry, says co-ordinator Brian Mitchell. “It’s the only project of its kind in North America.”
AFPA began the initiative to see whether Canada’s target under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change is achievable. The country agreed, under the yet-to-be-concluded international agreement, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to six per cent below 1990 levels.
Emissions across the country have increased nearly 13 per cent since 1990, however. So the actual cut required will be roughly 25 to 26 per cent.
“We said: ‘Let’s prove that it can be done and it can be done profitably,’ ” Gibson says.
The food processors association’s initial plan was to enroll six to 12 of its 200 member companies in the pilot project. But the response was overwhelming. Alberta Agriculture jumped in with funding from its Alberta Environmentally Sustainable Agriculture program. That enabled AFPA to expand the project to 34 member companies that operate a total of 46 food-processing facilities.
Project partner DukeSolutions Canada Inc., an energy services company, is conducting free energy audits on all 46 facilities. The audits analyse each facility’s operation, building and processing energy usage, water and waste flows, and transportation.
“Energy efficiency is universally recognized as the best possible method to improve your profits,” notes Mitchell, a director at Information Technology Specialists Inc., an energy and environmental consulting firm.
The 34 participating companies represent all six of Alberta’s food-processing sectors: meat and meat products, dairy, beverage, feed, bakery and fruit-vegetable. They range from a small bakery with four employees and a $15,000 annual energy budget to corporations including Molson’s Breweries, Lilydale Co-operative and Fletcher’s Fine Foods with multi-million-dollar budgets.
Big Rock Brewery in Calgary recently completed its energy audit and is eagerly awaiting the results, says company president Bob King. “We’re hopeful that this project will identify energy savings and at the same time contribute to the greenhouse gas emissions reduction.”
Consumers will continue to press for greater energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emission reductions, whatever happens to the Kyoto accord, King adds. “If you can accomplish both objectives at the same time, it makes good financial management sense.”
Each company’s baseline emissions and reductions will be registered with Voluntary Challenge and Registry Inc. (VCR). More than 750 companies in Canada are registered with VCR, which for five years has been closely tracking the private sector’s voluntary greenhouse gas emission reductions.
Registration with VCR will enable Alberta’s food-processing industry to claim credits for emission reductions and engage in trading emissions, Mitchell says. Emissions trading has already started worldwide, in anticipation of future government regulations to limit emissions and control global warming.
Energy audits for all 34 companies are scheduled to be complete by the end of January, says AFPA’s Gibson. Some firms have already proceeded to the next step — a detailed engineering report — and are poised to start making improvements.
With the price of natural gas and electricity soaring, “we’ll probably see a lot of people move ahead,” Gibson says. “It’s really become more dramatically evident that there’s real return on investment here.”
Some companies also are pursuing spinoff projects. They include Trochu Meats and the town of Trochu, which are investigating a joint venture to burn meat-packing and municipal waste in a cogeneration plant to produce heat and electricity.
The Alberta Research Council’s climate change technologies division has joined the project to provide expertise on recovering and utilizing greenhouse gas emissions. Natural Resources Canada’s Office of Energy Efficiency is onboard with services and funding to promote the initiative.
Other industry sectors and several municipalities have inquired about the project and want to do something similar, Gibson says. “I hope that we’ve dropped a small pebble and we’re going to see lots of ripples.”
