More Efficient Water Use in the Food and Beverage Industry
Program Goals and Background
Water is a critical resource and raw material in the food and beverage industry. Many companies have launched water stewardship initiatives to drive the conservation of water. Substantial water conservation can be achieved by re-purifying and recycling the clean water used in many processing and packaging steps. Advances in technology application are already being tested to do this, and their safe implementation will require the attention of experts from engineering, microbiology, and toxicology disciplines working together. The goal of this focus area for RSIA is to bring those experts together to apply new and sometimes innovative engineering, monitoring, and risk management approaches to the reduction of water use in the food and beverage industry.
Project 1: Guidelines for Water Recovery in the Bottling Industry
The bottling process requires water for cleaning containers and equipment, plant sanitation, boiling, cooking, fermenting, etc. Many water purification processes also reject water as a substantial fraction of the finished product. The Guidelines produced by this project will facilitate reductions in the bottling industry’s water footprint (total liters of water required to produce a liter of product) by guiding the application of monitoring and safety evaluation protocols for purification processes and technologies that have so far only been used in pilot or experimental applications.
The Guidelines will be developed by independent expert panels. A “core group” panel will serve as authors of the Guidelines, which a larger expert panel will review. Overall, the panels will include a broad spectrum of stakeholders interested in the safe reuse of water, including perspectives on the perceptual or acceptability aspects of reusing water. For the Guidelines to improve water safety and reduce overall water consumption, they must be acceptable to producers, regulators, and consumers concerned with product integrity and protection of the environment. Comments on the Draft Guideline or the Project
To help us ensure comprehensive consideration of perspectives, we invite public comment on all aspects of the project and the draft guideline. To view the Executive Summary and Table of Contents, please click here. Please send your input to: cleanwaterreuse@ilsi.org, which will help make this project a success.
Project Timeline
September 2011
- Project begins with an initial meeting of a core panel of experts, an in depth scoping discussion and identification of technical experts to author the guideline.
November
- First draft of the guideline is submitted to ILSI/RSIA.
- The draft was circulated to organizations, which expressed interest in the guideline and in observing the second meeting of the core expert panel.
January 24–26, 2012
- A presentation and a poster were presented at the ILSI Annual Meeting.
- Concurrent to the ILSI Annual Meeting, a second meeting of the core authors was held and revisions to the guideline were discussed.
- Additional authors are welcomed to the core panel.
February
- The core authors redrafted the guideline based their discussions during the second panel meeting.
April
- The core panel of authors submitted a second draft guideline to ILSI/RSIA.
- A group of 10 technical experts were asked to serve on a second panel charged with reviewing the draft guideline and making recommendations to strengthen the guideline and enhance its value added.
- Additional authors are welcomed to the core drafting panel of authors.
May
- The draft guideline was circulated to the initial review panel.
- Input received from this initial review was supplied to the panel of authors for consideration.
June
- The core authors revised the guideline and addressed the initial review panel’s recommendations and comments.
- A second, broad stakeholder review panel is identified and invited to review the latest draft.
July
- A second review cycle with a broad stakeholder panel will be conducted, potentially resulting in further revisions to the draft guideline.
- A poster on the Water Recovery Guideline will be presented at the World Brewing Congress annual meeting.
- Interested organizations and experts are invited to submit comments via the project website, and to join the core authors panel.
August
- The core authors panel revises the guideline and addresses comments from larger review group
- Final draft guideline is circulated to workshop participants.
September
- Expert Workshop tentatively in Washington, DC (pending funding)
October – November
- Needs assessment of revisions necessary to publish guideline
- Core panel of authors will make final revisions based on comments raised during expert workshop, and obtained through submissions to the project’s website.
December
- Depending on the outcome of the Needs Assessment, ILSI/RSIA anticipates publication of the Guideline early 2013.
January 18-23, 2013
- Presentation of the final guideline at the ILSI Annual Meeting in Miami, FL (pending funding)
|
|
|
|