No more trash at tortilla chip plant
Que Pasa Foods’ plant in Delta is the first Canadian facility to get a full thumbs-up from the U.S. Zero Waste Business Council.
“In trying to do the right thing, we discovered to our great surprise we were actually saving money and making money in the process,” said Arran Stephens, the co-CEO of Que Pasa’s parent company Nature’s Path. “We’ve actually realized an annual savings of $56,000.”
The 56,000-square-foot tortilla chip facility diverts 95 per cent of its waste, or half a million kilograms, from landfills, which qualifies it for zero-waste certification, Nature’s Path sustainability manager Jason Boyce said.
Nature’s Path’s facility in Blaine, Wash., is also certified. A third plant in Wisconsin is working toward certification.
Finding vendors to recycle cardboard was easy. The real challenge was corn waste.
“We were at 89 per cent (recycled waste) in 2014,” Boyce said. “We weren’t throwing (the corn waste) into the garbage, but we were struggling to get rid of it and not send it to the landfill. It was almost more work.”
Unlike many competitors, Que Pasa makes chips from whole corn, not refined cornmeal, Stephens said. Corn niblet waste is a fibre slurry that looks like creamed corn — and is just as heavy. Que Pasa’s Delta facility produces 10 tonnes of the stuff a week.
Volumewise, “imagine three Toyota Camrys each week shipped out of our facility. This stuff is hard to hold. If you put it inside a normal dumpster, it’ll leak out,” Boyce said.
Boyce spent three months looking for a waste recovery company to handle the waste, eventually finding Revolution Resource Recovery, which built a customized container and transports the waste for conversion into organic compost or other byproducts.
“We were absolutely prepared for this to cost money,” Boyce said.
When their waste auditor said they were instead making money, Nature’s Path was surprised.
“We’d never put thought into this as one system. It’s all different vendors,” Boyce said.
Que Pasa pays $35 a tonne for the corn slurry to be taken for recycling. “If we sent the same weight to a landfill, that would be $110 a tonne,” Boyce said.
The only cash outlay was “a few hundred dollars for containers to carry the (corn waste) from where production occurs to the dumpers. You get payback on the first load,” Boyce said.
Corn slurry is half of the waste Que Pasa generates. Another 30 per cent is wet corn meal that the company sells for animal feed, 10 per cent is cardboard and the remainder is plastics, bottles and paper, Boyce said.
Que Pasa has 60 employees and makes more than 4.5 million kilograms of tortilla chips a year. Que Pasa is the No. 1 organic tortilla chip in Canada, and third tortilla chip in Canada after Tostitos and Doritos.