Glanbia is working with suppliers and joint venture partners to nurture a sustainable dairy industry and deliver better nutrition responsibly.
While dairy can be a water-intensive business, in a world of increasing water scarcity, the good news is that the dairy industry is also uniquely placed to recover, reuse and recycle water. How? Through a strange-sounding but clever technology known as water polishing.
Polishing is the process of cleaning up the water component of milk after the fats, proteins and other nutritional elements have been extracted. Glanbia’s joint venture (JV) cheese and whey processing plant in Michigan generates around 800,000 gallons a day of clean water this way, recycling it as many times as possible to reduce the plant’s net use and minimise water down the drain.
Working with the water cycle
“We have become adept at recovering more water from raw milk and reusing the water in our processes,” says Michael Patten, Glanbia’s Chief ESG and Corporate Affairs Officer. “We’ve also become good at cleaning and treating it again and returning it to the environment.”
Surplus polished water from the Michigan plant is clean enough to be exported into the Great Lakes. The plant is effectively a net generator of water locally, since it returns more than it pulls from St. Johns, the nearest city.
“You see another example of water conservation at our Gooding plant in Idaho, where we harvest the water that comes in our milk supplies, use it in our processes, treat it and then use it to irrigate crops,” says Michael. “Those crops go into dairy cattle feed back on the farms and the process starts all over again.”
How farmers can help in the battle against climate change
Water conservation is just one of the ways Glanbia is engaging with suppliers and JV partners to make their operations more planet friendly – a partnership approach that Glanbia describes as ‘better dairy’. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) is a top priority: Glanbia has committed to a 25 percent emissions intensity reduction (1) in its milk supply chain by 2030 (2).
“We have data-mapped all our direct milk suppliers so they can understand their specific emission sources and calculate their baseline emission factor,” says Michael. Glanbia is tailoring the approach to each supplier and investigates how technology can help.
“We evaluate which technologies will be most effective at reducing on-farm GHGs and, just as important, which are economically viable and feasible,” Michael says. “Each farm will have its own way of doing things and it’s really important that the technologies match that, rather than a vanilla approach.”
Two ways dairy farmers are cutting methane emissions
The largest proportion of GHG emissions in Glanbia’s supply chain come from the cows’ digestive process (enteric methane) and their manure. Reducing methane emissions is important in the strategy to limit global temperature rises. Farmers can add probiotics to cattle feed and are successfully experimenting with other natural additives to reduce enteric emissions. They’re also using bacteria to break down manure into biogas – a process known as anaerobic digestion.
“Many of our farmers are already adopting anaerobic digestion and other emissions-reduction technologies, and our ambition is to promote that to make it more widespread,” Michael says. Biogas has a double benefit – as well as minimising methane emissions, once it is upgraded, it can be used as an energy source and to make electricity.
The dairy industry pathway to net zero
Glanbia is acting to mitigate the climate impacts of the dairy products it uses in its branded and ingredients businesses, even though their production lies outside the company’s immediate operations.
So, the company is positively engaging with suppliers and JV partners through programmes such as the US dairy industry’s Net Zero Initiative (NZI) to promote regenerative agricultural practices and lessen on-farm reliance on fossil fuels.
“It’s a particular and unique challenge we have, quite different from other organisations,” says Michael. “We’ve got to take the total value chain in mind.”
“We know where we need to get to and we’re making good progress. Our focus now is on how we continue to navigate that journey in a way that makes sense for all stakeholders in the value chain,” he says.
Find out more about Glanbia’s sustainability priorities here.
References
(1) Emissions intensity is the volume of emissions per unit of economic output.
(2) Against a 2018 baseline.