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CASA GRANDE, Ariz. — At Frito-Lay’s factory here, more than 500,000 pounds of potatoes arrive every day from New Mexico to be washed, sliced, fried, seasoned and portioned into bags of Lay’s and Ruffles chips. The process devours enormous amounts of energy, and creates vast amounts of wastewater, starch and potato peelings.
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Jeff Topping for The New York Times
The use of vacuum hoses at an Arizona plant reduces the amount of heat needed to cook potato chips.
Now, Frito-Lay is embarking on an ambitious plan to change the way this factory operates, and in the process, create a new type of snack: the environmentally benign chip.
Its goal is to take the Casa Grande plant off the power grid, or nearly so, and run it almost entirely on renewable fuels and recycled water. Net zero, as the concept is called, has the backing of the highest levels of corporate executives at PepsiCo, the parent company of Frito-Lay.
There are benefits besides the potential energy savings. Like many other large corporations, PepsiCo is striving to establish its green credentials as consumers become more focused on climate change. There are marketing opportunities, too. The company, for example, intends to advertise that its popular SunChips snacks are made using solar energy.
“We don’t know what the complete payoff for net zero is going to be,” said Indra K. Nooyi, PepsiCo’s chairman and chief executive. “If this works even to 50 or 60 percent of its potential, that is fantastic, and it’s so much better than what we already have.”
From coast to coast, more companies are thinking about how much fossil fuel they use and ways to conserve energy. Venture capital money is also pouring into fledgling green technology.
Only a few years ago, Andy Walker, a government engineer, pleaded with companies to tackle the problems but got blank stares. “Now, my phone is ringing off the hook,” said Mr. Walker, who works at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the Department of Energy in Colorado.
But advocacy groups contend that for all the interest in saving energy, many companies also exaggerate small improvements for marketing purposes.
“Now I think there’s a transition, and it’s only begun and the grandstanding is ahead of the action,” said Joel Swisher, director of research at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit energy research organization.
He said that some companies were trumpeting relatively modest changes. “Not that it’s a bad thing,” he added. “It is moving in the right direction.”
Some companies have pursued much more ambitious changes. Toyota Motor Engineering and Manufacturing North America said it had managed to reduce energy consumption for every vehicle manufactured by more than 24 percent since 2002. Texas Instruments built a green semiconductor plant in Texas in 2006 that the company expects will save $4 million a year in energy and water costs.
PepsiCo, meanwhile, has become the nation’s biggest buyer of renewable energy credits, a financial instrument that stimulates the development of renewable energy sources, and its subsidiaries are retrofitting plants and distribution centers to reduce energy.
The net zero concept, however, is the company’s most ambitious environmental venture to date. Reaching its goal of taking it almost completely off the power grid will not be easy.
Over the next several years, Frito-Lay plans to install high-tech filters that would recycle most of the water used to rinse and wash potatoes, as well as the corn used to make Doritos and other snacks, and then burn the leftover sludge to create methane gas to run the plant’s boiler.
The company will also build at least 50 acres of solar concentrators behind the plant to generate solar power. A biomass generator, which will probably burn agricultural waste, is also planned to provide additional renewable fuel.
The retrofit of the Casa Grande factory, scheduled to be completed by 2010, would reduce electricity and water consumption by 90 percent and its natural gas use by 80 percent. Greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by 50 percent to 75 percent, the company said.