Covanta is proud to be Sunny Delight’s partner in waste management, helping them reach their goal of being 100 percent landfill free three years ahead of schedule. The company, whose beverage products include SunnyD, Fruit2O and Veryfine, also set an accompanying goal to be 95 percent recycled and is now within 2 percent of its recycle‐reuse target.

When the company’s landfill free goal was first announced, Sunny Delight’s Sherman, Texas, manufacturing facility was sending 140 tons of waste per year to landfill. We worked closely with Sunny Delight to analyze its waste stream and find ways to reduce waste, including identifying more material that could be sold to recyclers. That solution not only reduced the total volume of waste, but also the costs of hauling and disposal. In fact, the facility’s entire reduce‐reuse‐recycle‐recover effort now more than offsets the cost of disposal and produces a financial benefit.

“Covanta is playing a very important part for us by offering a truly sustainable way to manage what we cannot recycle,” said David Nelson, Operations Leader at the plant in Sherman, Texas. “We already were doing well, but they helped us take our sustainability efforts to a whole new level.”

In total, Covanta helped reduce the Sherman facility’s waste stream disposal by up to two and a half tons per month. For the portion of the waste stream that cannot be reused or recycled, we provide landfill avoidance through the EfW process, which yields a positive benefit in the form of clean energy.

Sunny Delight was also one of Covanta’s first customers to use our new UnWrapp capability. This consumer products depackaging program uses specialized technology to depackage products that cannot be sold and reuses or recycles their material components.