Anna Palazij, director of resource conservation & sustainability at PepsiCo Beverages America, spoke to Hopkins students and faculty last week as part of the M. Gordon Wolman Seminar Series co-hosted by the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering (DoGEE).
Palazij graduated from Hopkins in 2001 with a Bachelor of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering. She has worked for PepsiCo since 2010.
Palazij’s presentation, titled “Managing Sustainability at a Fortune 100 Company — A Look Through an Engineering Lens,” focused on sustainability initiatives at PepsiCo Beverages such as energy management, water conservation and waste reduction. Palazij also detailed how engineering teams at PepsiCo work to design sustainable facilities and operations, as well as the ways in which these teams engage supply chains, consumer groups and stakeholders outside of the factory to minimize the corporation’s carbon footprint.
Over the last decade or so, PepsiCo has worked to develop and broadcast its philosophy on sustainability. In order to become more profitable and efficient on the sustainability front, the company has focused primarily on energy and water conservation as well as reduced use of packaging material. Palazij emphasized PepsiCo’s motto “Performance with Purpose,” which communicates the company’s dedication to finding innovative ways to minimize its impact on the environment.
According to Palazij, the idea of “Performance with Purpose” is built upon three pillars: human sustainability, environmental sustainability and talent sustainability.
“Social sustainability really touches on all the elements of these, so we don’t have a separate pillar for it,” Palazij added.
Palazij concentrated primarily on environmental sustainability during her presentation, listing the main focuses of the program. The first focus, she said, is helping to protect and conserve global water supplies, especially in water-stressed areas, and provide access to safe water.
“Water is a very localized issue,” Palazij explained. “We’re trying to do more and more about restoring water to the same watershed we took it from.”
Another focus of the initiative deals with packaging, waste and recycling. Creating innovative, sustainable packaging that has less impact on the environment is very important to PepsiCo; the company has focused intently on reducing the size of its packaging.
“For example, I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but the cap necks on bottles have gotten shorter,” Palazij said. “That’s specifically one where it’s not impacting anything in the bottle. It’s lightweighting.”
The bottles themselves have gotten lighter as well.
“Our Aquafina bottles are 50 percent lighter than they used to be for a 16.9 ounce bottle,” Palazij said.
Additionally, Propel bottles are 30 percent lighter than they used to be. In the past five years alone, PepsiCo has reduced the collective weight of its products by over 350 million pounds.
Regarding waste and recycling initiatives, PepsiCo also strives to eliminate the solid waste that is sent to landfills from its production facilities.
“We try to find as many beneficial uses for our waste as possible,” Palazij said. “We have a number of factories that are less than one percent and a number that are zero landfill.”
Palazij underscored the company’s commitment to increasing recycling rates.
“We also use 10 percent post-consumer recycled content in our bottles on average,” she said.
In addition, PepsiCo is constantly working to achieve an absolute reduction in greenhouse gas emissions through increased energy efficiency and fuel conservation. One of the ways it has sought to do this is by developing and installing more energy efficient vending machines that utilize LED-based lighting as well as motion sensors.
Palazij was well received by her audience.
“[The presentation] was interesting because the speaker graduated from Hopkins with a civil engineering degree and ended up working in sustainability at a corporate level,” junior Michelle Bohrson said. “And while that’s not exactly what I want to do, I am going to graduate Hopkins as an engineer and was glad to see that she was successful and passionate with another career path.”
