Sustainability: Water & Wastewater

Water Reuse and Recycling

Poultry processing requires the use of relatively high volumes of potable water to assure the production of safe products for the consumer. We realize the water we use throughout the production process must be managed efficiently and responsibly.

Pilgrim's is committed to conserving water to the maximum extent possible, and we have installed water reuse systems at essentially all of our processing plants to help accomplish this goal. Four of our plants are also equipped with large-scale water reuse systems that each save 200,000 to 600,000 gallons of water per day. These combined systems save a total of more than 1.5 million gallons of water per day, or 390 million gallons per year.

Water conservation systems installed in our other processing plants enable us to reuse 100,000 to 300,000 gallons per day in each facility. This equals a combined total of more than 1 million gallons of water saved per day, or 260 million gallons per year. We are continuously evaluating the feasibility of additional water reuse systems in our processing operations and will implement systems in the future as regulations, technology, environmental benefits and costs allow.

Wastewater Management

Our company operates wastewater pretreatment and/or treatment systems at all of our processing plants. These systems utilize state-of-the-art treatment technologies and comply with permit requirements established by the appropriate states or municipalities and federal regulatory agencies.

Several of our wastewater management systems have received awards for superior performance and innovation. The wastewater treatment team at our plant in Russellville, Alabama, has earned multiple awards from the Alabama Water Environment Association for advanced biological and water reuse systems, becoming the first repeat winner of this prestigious honor. In 2005, the team also received the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association Clean Water Award in the Full Treatment category, recognizing excellence in performance in achieving permit effluent requirements, operator proficiency and overall environmental impacts and benefits.

Our Russellville plant is situated on approximately 1,200 acres of land and features a “zero-discharge” wastewater treatment system using a system of physical, chemical and biological treatment prior to land application on farmland. No wastewater is discharged from this system, which manages approximately 500 million gallons a year of treated wastewater.

In this process, water used in processing undergoes several steps of treatment before being sprayed over 454 acres of coastal Bermuda grass around the plant. This serves as a natural biological treatment system that uses the nutrients in the wastewater for vegetative growth and keeps these nutrients from building up in the soil.

Up to 2.5 million gallons of water is applied to the fields each day, which results in healthy, green pastures that produce a substantial amount of hay. To manage these fields, the wastewater team at Russellville turned the land into a “cattle ranch” with a herd of 400 to 600 head of Angus cattle grazing in the pastures. In implementing this system, they took special care to ensure that local streams are protected by fencing and vegetative buffers and that the cattle do not add to erosion of the pastures. There are 800 acres of buffer land around these pastures, and 80 of these acres have been planted with Loblolly Pine trees to serve as a windbreak, which provides habitat for wildlife and prevents erosion.

Water Quality Strategies

Pilgrim's has also taken a proactive role in the development of strategies to benefit the environment through the reduction of nutrient loadings in wastewater discharges.

Our processing plant in Mt. Pleasant, Texas, operates a biological treatment system that discharges into a stream, which ultimately flows into a reservoir that serves as the water supply for over 50,000 people. Regulatory agency studies have indicated a need to reduce the phosphorus loadings into the reservoir by more than 50%. We are partnering with several municipalities in the drainage basin through an innovative trading strategy through which we will provide all of the treatment needed to achieve the required phosphorus reduction for the entire basin in lieu of each of the individual municipalities having to implement expensive system improvements. The trading strategy will provide a more reliable approach to achieving the desired nutrient reductions while allowing significant cost savings for the users across the basin. A portion of the savings will be used to fund ongoing monitoring in the basin to measure the success of the overall implementation plan to reduce nutrients.

In Moorefield, West Virginia, our processing plants also operate biological treatment systems with direct discharges to a receiving stream. Chesapeake Bay nutrient strategy initiatives require total nitrogen and total phosphorus levels to be reduced to very low levels, so we are partnering with Hardy County and the City of Moorefield to implement a regional treatment system to achieve these nutrient reduction objectives. Participation in this regional system will cost us more than if we treated our own wastewater, but the regional system is believed to be the best long-range strategy for the area.

We believe we are taking a leadership role in the areas of water reuse and wastewater management, and our continuing goal is to be an industry leader in lowest water usage per bird processed and lowest wastewater discharge volume per bird processed.