According to the EPA, food accounts for 24 percent of material in U.S. municipal solid waste landfills—more than any other single material—and decomposes under anaerobic conditions to produce methane, a greenhouse gas the EPA estimates is approximately 28 times more potent than CO₂ over a 100-year period. The resources consumed to grow, process, and distribute that food—water, land, energy, and labor—are wasted along with it.
High-pressure processing addresses this problem directly. By extending refrigerated shelf life from days to weeks or months without sustained heat or synthetic preservatives, HPP keeps product out of landfills, reduces spoilage-driven waste, and lowers the total resource cost of food production across the supply chain.
Thermal pasteurization requires sustained high temperatures—energy-intensive to reach, maintain, and then reverse through cooling. HPP operates differently. Cold water is pressurized and cycled through the system; the same water is reused across multiple runs.
There is no heating cycle to power and no cooling cycle to manage afterward.
The net result is significantly lower energy consumption per unit processed compared with heat-based methods.
Traditional thermal processing uses water during heating, cooling, and facility cleaning. HPP systems recirculate processing water across cycles, reducing total water consumption and minimizing discharge.
Fresh products treated with high-pressure technology last weeks or months longer than their untreated equivalents. That extension has direct environmental consequences:
The consequences of food reaching landfills extend beyond the product itself:
This is where many sustainability conversations about HPP stall. HPP requires packaging that is flexible, durable, leak-proof, and capable of withstanding up to 87,000 psi of hydrostatic pressure. That requirement effectively rules out glass. It also rules out cardboard, styrofoam, and most rigid non-plastic formats.
Plastic is the viable option. That fact deserves more scrutiny than a dismissal — because when evaluated across the full production and distribution lifecycle, plastic packaging paired with HPP frequently has a lower total environmental impact than glass alternatives.
Plastic is 10–12 times lighter than glass for equivalent volume. On a loaded truck, that weight difference translates to 20–40% less fuel consumed per unit. Lighter loads also allow trucks to be filled more efficiently—more units per run, fewer total trips, and lower cumulative emissions.
Producing glass requires temperatures approaching 2,600°F and consumes up to ten times more energy per bottle than plastic production. PET plastic melts at significantly lower temperatures, with corresponding reductions in fuel use and manufacturing emissions.
Glass breaks during filling, transit, and shelving. Each breakage event is both a product loss and an environmental cost; the resources invested in that product are discarded along with the packaging. Plastic’s durability eliminates this failure mode.
Plastic packaging is customizable and compressible in ways glass is not. Paired with HPP-optimized packaging design, this enables more units per crate or truck, less secondary packaging material, and lower energy consumption per unit processed.
The full lifecycle—manufacturing, filling, transport, distribution, and end-of-life—is the relevant unit of analysis, not the material category alone.
American Pasteurization Company is a founding member of the Cold Pressure Council, the industry organization that promotes HPP standardization, administers the High Pressure Certified® mark, and advances education on HPP’s food-safety and environmental benefits.
APC’s involvement with the Council reflects more than 20 years of operational commitment to high-pressure technology—not as a sustainability marketing position, but as the foundation of how we process food.
Visit the Cold Pressure Council
Sustainability claims require substantiation. Retailers, institutional buyers, and increasingly consumers expect documentation, not positioning language.
HPP provides a measurable mechanism: documented refrigerated shelf-life extension, quantifiable reduction in spoilage rates, and a processing method that operates without sustained heat or synthetic chemical inputs. These are claims that can be tested, validated, and reported.
APC’s food-safety and quality protocols, SQF-certified facilities, and laboratory partnerships provide the documentation infrastructure to support those claims through the supply chain.
Tell us about the product, packaging, refrigerated shelf-life target, current waste profile, and the environmental claims or reporting requirements you need to support.
