Environmental sustainability

 

We have been working on reducing our environmental impact for a long time. Cargill established our first energy efficiency goal in 2000 and have goals in place through 2015 to improve performance and conserve energy resources. Cargill invests in a variety of innovative solutions to use energy and resources more wisely.

Environmental innovation examples

• Upgrading an aging boiler system. A recent $6.1 million investment by Cargill to upgrade an aging boiler system at the company’s Plainview, Texas, beef processing facility has increased efficiency, reduced energy consumption and added steam capacity that will enable the facility to grow and expand product offerings to customers, both present and future. New boiler system efficiency at Plainview has reached 92 percent, an improvement of 19 percent over the aging system it replaced. This is the latest of more than $50 million invested by Cargill in processing plant efficiency projects at Plainview over the past five years. 
• Advanced treatment systems for water conservation. At Cargill’s malt plant complex in Salzgitter, Germany, recycled water is used for steam boilers, cooling towers and for steeping barley, the first stage of the malting process. Cargill found ways to assemble existing technology – such as ultra-filtration and reverse osmosis systems – in some unique ways. It allowed the vast majority of water at the plant to be collected, purified to drinking water quality and recycled. The plant also collects and uses rainwater in its systems. Cargill’s new system here eliminates 5,000 metric tons of sludge that annually accumulated in the previous water treatment system.
• Energy performance. Four Cargill Corn Milling North America locations – Blair, Nebraska; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Eddyville, Iowa; and Wahpeton, North Dakota, earned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA's) prestigious ENERGY STAR, the national symbol for protecting the environment through energy efficiency. This places Cargill Corn Milling facilities in Blair, Cedar Rapids, Eddyville and Wahpeton, within the top 25 percent of wet corn milling plants in the nation, with regard to energy performance.
• GHG emission credits. Over the past five years, we’ve developed – not merely invested in – projects that will generate an estimated 800,000 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions emission credits by 2012. For instance, we build and operate anaerobic digesters, including locations in Indonesia, Thailand and three on dairy farms in the United States. These sites generate carbon credits from reduced methane emissions in the atmosphere.
• Fueled by sawdust. Our animal nutrition business in Honduras has replaced diesel-run boilers with a boiler fueled by sawdust from the local lumber industry. Switching from diesel to sawdust has reduced carbon emissions by about 6,000 metric tons per year.
• Fueled by eucalyptus wood chips. Our complex in Uberlândia, Brazil, is using wood chips from fast-growing eucalyptus trees as biomass to power the site’s bioboiler. The process will generate 70 percent of the power and 100 percent of the steam at this location, resulting in a savings of 60,000 metric tons of fuel oil per year and reduced GHG emissions.
• Recycling water. Our poultry facility in London, Ontario, Canada, reduced freshwater consumption by 28 percent in 24 months, in part because all of the water used for chilling at the facility is recycled twice for cooling and rinsing.
• Biogas. At our beef and pork plants, Cargill reclaims methane from our waste water lagoons and turns it into biogas to fuel its plant boilers. Biogas now displaces 20-25 percent of natural gas demand at all eight of our U.S. meat processing plants, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by more than 1.3 million metric tons in the last four years.

• More about behavior-based energy savings

  Behavior-based energy management. Cargill is seeing great returns from its global behavior-based energy management (BBEM) system—a tool used to engage employees and integrate energy into daily actions to improve performance. It’s led to the formation of several new efforts, including a robust leak tag initiative at our seven U.S. corn milling facilities which has resulted in the identification of water, compressed air and steam leaks and major energy cost savings.

More examples in Learn More - Energy and Water Saving Innovations.