At Martin’s Snacks, we are committed to being good stewards of our land, air and water resources. We have a long history of environmentally friendly practices. It’s not about being trendy – it’s about doing the right thing. We believe that “actions speak louder than words”.
In the process of making potato chips and popcorn, we produce waste. However, at Martin’s most of the waste generated is used by local farms for feed (if edible), for soil amendment (dirt and mud) and for fertilizer (wash water). Cooking oil waste is utilized by a rendering plant for use in many other products. The materials that we can’t directly recycle are sent to a local waste to energy conversion plant. Metal scraps and used motor oil from maintenance operations are recycled.
The buildings and processes in our plant have been designed to be environmentally friendly and energy efficient. As an example, we recover heat from the fryer steam exhaust stack utilizing two heat exchangers. One heat exchanger provides about 80% of the building heat in the winter months and the other heat exchanger is used to warm the incoming makeup air. All of the lights are controlled by individual motion sensors so that they only come on if needed and they automatically go off when nobody is there. All of the lights are high efficiency fluorescent or LED lights. Clean burning natural gas is used to heat the fryers. Waste heat from the oil coolers is used to heat some of the hot water.
Low flow on demand sink faucets and toilets are used throughout our facilities. Potato washing and peeling water is cleaned and internally recycled, reducing our water use for peeling by 80%. Low water consumption batch peelers are used. Stack condensate from the heat recovery system is utilized for potato washing. Fresh water is always used in the final rinsing of potatoes.
When snacks are delivered to the store, we bring the empty cartons back to our factory to pack them again with the assistance of our retail customers. These cardboard boxes are used an average of 4 times before they get recycled externally. We reuse our wooden pallets, and recycle the ones that are not usable. We also use many plastic pallets, which are used over and over again for years. The potato chip bags themselves are not recyclable, as the technology for this is not yet widely available. However, these sophisticated packages extend the shelf life of the chips, which reduces overall waste.
High capacity trailers and fuel efficient diesel tractors are used to transport our snacks to distributors and branch warehouse. We plan our trailer delivery trips to be able to back-haul supplies and other snacks, making for more effective resource utilization. Our route delivery fleet has been recently upgraded with over 60% of the fleet now consisting of V6 powered, aerodynamic, new generation box vans, with fuel consumption reduced by more than 20% compared to conventional step vans typically used in our industry.