Our goal is to ensure a healthy environment. In partnership with our suppliers, we use economically viable practices to protect scarce resources; improve air, water, and soil quality; protect wildlife resources; and conserve non-renewable mineral resources. We reduce waste and pollution through technological innovation, conserve energy, and economize our use of water, pesticides and nutrients to those biologically required for a successful crop.
Fundamental sustainability equals efficient use of all resources, through high product yields, factory design and scale, and processes resulting in high product output per unit of input resources. All of these we believe are done best at Morning Star.
Every Drop of Water Counts
Process water efficiency dropped due to the excessively long season and lowered factory speed at Liberty.
Resource Recovery
Our standard practice is to recover as many usable resources as possible from the various plant byproducts. Most peel is further processed. Seeds and the remaining peel are called pomace, which is utilized in a multitude of ways, including soil amendments, animal feed and pet food. This ensures 100% of the tomato serves a useful and environmentally friendly purpose.
Efficient Natural Gas Consumption
Natural gas is primarily used to heat water to produce steam which is then used for a variety of purposes. In addition, we have two cogeneration units that combust natural gas to power our large electrical generators. This combined cycle process makes for much more efficient gas usage than importing electricity from the grid and combusting gas alone in a boiler. In addition, we establish a “micro-grid” which is fully self-contained within the factory premises, reducing the burden and demand on the larger electrical grid operation and maintenance.
Conserving Electricity
Our facilities are specifically designed to minimize electrical power consumption. One primary way is the maximum use of steam turbines. Another is accomplished through the use of cooling ponds for the water used by evaporators. Water is pumped to the top of evaporators where it flows out the bottom and back to the cooling pond by gravity. Considering the massive volume of water that flows through the system, pumping the water only once saves approximately 2.2 million kilowatt hours per factory per year.
Responsible Packaging Solutions
The containers we ship our product in are signs of our commitment to conserve and reuse. Just like other resources we use in the enterprise, we encourage our customers to recycle and reuse the containers we ship to them along with the tomato product.
Driving Less
Our trucks haul two specially designed lightweight trailers that carry, on average, two tons more tomatoes per trip and still stay under the legal weight limit. This means fewer trips from the field to the factory, resulting in reduced emissions.
