From Green Right Now Reports
Who knew that the process of harvesting and packing bananas was a water-intensive process?
Apparently, a lot of water is used to hold the fruit until it is selected for packing, and the fruit is floated in tanks while workers sort out the bananas ready for shipping. But Dole Food Company, Inc., the world’s largest producer and marketer of fresh fruit and vegetables, and the biggest producer of organic bananas, has announced a pilot project in Costa Rica that reduces water use by more than 80 percent and cuts energy use in half.
The company’s Standard Fruit de Costa Rica division developed a new routine for harvesting and selecting bananas that brought these tasks closer to the field. The new chain of operations cut out holding time between the picking and packing of the bananas, reducing the water and energy requirements of the process, according to Dole, which is based in Westlake Village, Calif.
Dole reports that a team of managers and workers collaborated to develop the new process, which it calls the New Millennium Packing System.
“The total impact of this system, if implemented on a regional level, would allow the banana industry to save over sixty million cubic meters of water used in packing. As climate change affects water availability in the developing world, solutions such as our New Millennium Packing System have the potential to free enough water to provide for the needs of a population of over 30,000 people per year,” said Danilo Roman, General Manager, Standard Fruit de Costa Rica, in a news statement. Standard Fruit de Costa Rica was the main sponsor of the program.
The project won favorable reviews from the co-director of the Sustainable Food Lab, Hal Hamilton, who recently visited the project.
“There are two things that make this project quite unique,” Hamilton said in the news statement. “First of all, the development team includes people from all backgrounds from field workers to supervisors. Secondly, most innovation projects focus just on productivity. In this case, the search for beneficial environmental impacts such as water and electricity use is driving the innovation.”
While Dole is improving operations, environmentally, critics of modern-day banana plantations say they will not be fully sustainable until growers move away from the monoculture approach that has genetically weakened the fruit and left it susceptible to disease.
For an amplification, see this blog predicting an dark future for plantation bananas at Make Wealth History, a website devoted to sustainable ideas and run by two brothers from the UK who grew up in Africa.