At Post Consumer Brands™, we believe it’s our responsibility to help make the world a better place. This includes continuously looking for ways to minimize water usage in our manufacturing processes and protect and preserve this valuable resource that is essential to producing the grocery and pet food products you and your family love.
Current water initiative projects
Our water initiatives at Post Consumer Brands historically aim to minimize water usage in the cleaning process and reduce the potential for pathogenic growth. These programs focus on implementing effective dry-cleaning methods, where practical, to leverage alternative methods and tools to remove dust and other food debris.
We are advancing water conservation initiatives across our manufacturing network through targeted engineering and process improvements.
Lawrence pet food facility water optimization projects
At one of our pet food facilities, in Lawrence, Kansas, we have optimized water use for air compressor cooling, delivering expected annual water savings of approximately 10 million gallons. That’s equivalent to the yearly water use of 100 average American households. Building on that success, we are planning an additional cooling system project in Lawrence that is expected to save two million gallons of water per year and reduce electricity use by 700,000 kilowatt-hours; the amount of energy consumed by more than 60 American households annually.
Meadville pet food facility water metering project
At another one of our pet food facility in Meadville, Pennsylvania, a recent project identified discrepancies in water metering that had been overestimating actual usage. Improved data validation is now helping us better understand consumption.
Additional water conservation projects are in development at other manufacturing sites, to reduce water and energy use while also reducing costs.
Assessing our water impact
You can learn more about our goals for water usage in our latest Sustainability Report. We are dedicated to reducing water usage and treating wastewater to protect local watersheds at all our sites across North America, in line with UN Sustainable Development Goal 6. One of our sustainability goals is to provide safe, high-quality products to our consumers and assess our water impact, particularly in high-water stress areas.
We’re working to address many different aspects of responsible water usage, including, water quantity, quality, governance, ecosystems, water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), and extreme weather resiliency globally. Each year, we conduct a global water risk assessment of our operational sites and our ingredient and packaging supplier locations. As a result, we improved data collection to understand sourcing, use, and discharge. From this assessment, we will decide on further review, actions, and investments, focusing on sites in high-water stress regions to verify safe water stewardship and consider watershed involvement.
Water usage reduction is only one of the ways we are working to minimize our impact on the environment. Read more about our commitment to protecting our natural resources.