I like orange juice. It tastes good, it’s pretty good for me, and it’s an essential ingredient in a screwdriver. Then I did my fortnightly sustainability tip for work about it. What a massive bummer that turned out to be.
OJ has been taking its knocks in the news lately, thanks in part to a new book called Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice. The author, Alissa Hamilton, recently had some revealing things to say about OJ:
“In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn’t oxidize. Then it’s put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it’s ready for packaging, companies … engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh.”
“The orange growing is moving to Brazil, which grows the most oranges for juice by far. Land is cheaper, and environmental regulations are almost nonexistent.”
Last month, Tropicana revealed the carbon footprint of its Pure Premium orange juice. Treehugger compared it to Fiji bottled water, which is about the worst of a bad thing.
- 2 liters of Tropicana Pure Premium (.53 gal) = 3.96 lbs of CO2.
- 2 liters of Fiji bottled water = 1.1 lbs. of CO2
And that doesn’t even count OJ’s water footprint (story and photo from the Economist)
First Person Irregular 