How Green Is My Orange

These are highlights from a recent article in the New York Times. A link to the full article is above. It is interesting but not surprising to find out that the majority of the carbon foot print of orange juice comes from fossil fuel based fertilizer that is used in the orange groves....... And that fertilizer would be? Ammonia based Nitrogen.....produced the only way the world knows how with fossil fuel and the Haber Bosch process......

Yet another reason to keep our project moving forward.

By Andrew Martin
Published: Thursday, January 22, 2009

BRADENTON, Florida — How much does your morning glass of orange juice contribute to global warming?

PepsiCo, which owns the Tropicana brand, decided to try to answer that question. It figured that as public concern grows about the fate of the planet, companies will find themselves under pressure to perform such calculations. Orange juice seemed like a good case study.

PepsiCo hired experts to do the math, measuring the emissions from such energy-intensive tasks as running a factory and transporting heavy juice cartons. But it turned out that the biggest single source of emissions was simply growing oranges. Citrus groves use a lot of nitrogen fertilizer, which requires natural gas to make and can turn into a potent greenhouse gas when it is spread on fields.

PepsiCo finally came up with a number: the equivalent of 3.75 pounds, or 1.7 kilograms, of carbon dioxide are emitted to the atmosphere for each half-gallon, or 1.9 liter, carton of orange juice. But the company is still debating how to use that information. Should it cite the number in its marketing, and would consumers have a clue what to make of it?

Making orange juice is relatively straightforward: the oranges are picked by hand, trucked to the plant, squeezed, pasteurized and packed into cartons and shipped by train to distribution points around the country. Early on, company officials roughed out the carbon footprint of Tropicana juice. But when the Carbon Trust came back with its own calculations, that initial estimate was off by more than 20 percent.

Growing the oranges accounted for a larger share — about a third — than PepsiCo had expected, almost entirely because of the production and application of fertilizer.