PepsiCo has become the first food plant in Turkey to obtain a Biomethanization Environmental License with its Suadiye production facility in the northern Marmara province of Kocaeli and is now licensed to generate energy by buying organic waste from outside, the company said in a statement.

The company took a step further in generating energy by processing organic waste from production process that began in 2007 at PepsiCo Suadiye Plant, which has been operating since 1995, and will generate energy by buying organic waste from outside with the license granted by the Environment and Urban Planning Ministry. Biomethanization, meaning the process during which organic waste undergoes biochemical reactions to turn into a biogas and fermented product, has been conducted at the Suadiye factory for more than 10 years. In the production facility with a closed area of 26,000 square meters, a total of 24,480 tons of potatoes and 4,244 tons of corn are processed annually. Thanks to the Organic Waste Facility, established at the Suadiye plant for the first time for PepsiCo factories in Turkey, the factory has been operating with zero waste since 2012.

Since 2014, organic waste from production has been processed in anaerobic reactors with a wet volume of 4,200 cubic meters in the Suadiye Plant Organic Waste Facility. After the waste is utilized in energy production, the remaining waste is used to manufacture the organomineral fertilizer Naturalis, which is used in PepsiCo's potato croplands.

With Naturalis, the amount of chemicals used in fertilizer production is reduced by 40 percent, while the amount of chemicals that will diffuse into soil is minimized. Thus, while the goal of zero waste is being achieved, carbon dioxide emissions arising from the process are reduced by 11.5 percent.