Aquacycl’s system is self-contained in a 40-foot shipping container filled with fuel cells that are more easily controlled remotely.

Across the country, large companies are doing their part to reduce their carbon footprints in manufacturing and production — and the Central Valley’s manufacturers are no exception.

With droughts a common occurrence in California, a constantly increasing population places a higher strain on the water supply. Additionally, that strain is made more apparent due to the state’s lifeblood, an ag industry that brought in $51.1 billion in 2021.

With that in mind, the Pepsi bottling plant in Fresno has introduced several water and energy saving techniques in the production and bottling of Pepsi products.

One of the biggest water conservation challenges facing PepsiCo is wastewater treatment — that is, the conversion of wastewater into water that is once again safe for the environment.

Ben Duncan, Fresno’s PepsiCo manufacturing leader, explained that the company, in particular the Fresno bottling plant, is at the forefront of the clean wastewater initiative, utilizing a brand-new technique to convert wastewater back to an environmentally safe condition.

To get rid of, in this case, sugars in the wastewater, bacteria are used to break down the sugar and convert it into smaller compounds to further the wastewater treatment process.

“Conventional wastewater treatment sites, they have huge vats and ponds,” Duncan said. “They feed this wastewater into a biosludge. In that biosludge is all of these aerobic bacteria — bugs — that need oxygen and sugar to metabolize and convert it and clean up the water.”

Duncan explained that due to the bacteria being aerobic — needing oxygen to survive — up to 60% of a company’s energy consumption can consist of running air through wastewater to oxidize the water for the bacteria to survive.

That’s where Pepsi has partnered with San Diego-based company Aquacycl, whose technology breaks down wastewater utilizing a new technique — microbial fuel cells.

The machine itself is in a 40-foot shipping container filled with fuel cells. Wastewater is pumped through the cells from the company’s expired product and filtered through the bio electric treatment technology (BETT) unit, which houses fuel cells where the sugar in the water is broken down.

The bacteria in Aquacycl’s technology, however, function differently from standard wastewater treatment techniques.

“These bugs are like super bugs,” Duncan said. They’re not aerobic bugs and bacteria colonies you’ll find in typical wastewater treatment plants — they’re anaerobic, meaning they don’t need oxygen to survive.”

These naturally existing bacteria also happen to be electrogenic, meaning they produce electricity when they consume sugars.

Being electrogenic, they respond to voltage, giving PepsiCo the ability to control how quickly the water is returned, a process that takes far less time and produces more efficient results, with 30-85% of sugars being removed from the water.

The process takes only nine hours.

Additionally, the process uses only 60 kilowatt hours of energy monthly, a massive reduction from the average 41,000 kilowatts of electricity that conventional systems use.

“One other cool thing about them being electrogenic — you can hook up probes to their computer and they can actually, from down in San Diego, remotely monitor each cell and tell you how healthy the bug colonies are in each cell because they’re releasing these electrons as they eat sugar,” Duncan said.

Ultimately, the Aquacycl system saves the company over 115 tons of greenhouse gasses a month, while also cutting operating time and overall, saving the company far more energy than conventional methods could ever be capable of.

Duncan anticipates this process to become widely used in the future, mainly because of the benefits of the entire process.

The successful implementation of the Aquacycl system at the Fresno bottling plant has PepsiCo considering testing the product at other markets, with Fresno’s plant expanding the capacity of the system following initial testing.

Duncan believes this technology will be a game changer for companies in the future, and takes pride in the Fresno plant being the first to utilize the new energy, water and time saving techniques

“I think this is going to blow up,” he said. “I’m excited about this one.”