Food Manufacturers Often Ignore The Hidden Profits In Their Waste Stream
Reduce energy to help the environment and deliver a tangible bottom-line benefit. Customer care about how companies conduct their business and are more prepared to favour businesses that fit with their expectations and code of ethics. Whilst the new-acronym is ESG (Environment, Social Responsibility and Governance), which outlines a business’s intentions.
Manufacturers must have consistent processes and profit focused objectives to be competitive.
The 3R’s (Reduce Reuse, Recycle) enable teams to have a meaningful impact on improving profits.
Food manufacturers have 3 unavoidable waste streams that they are stuck with:
- Process water to effluent
- Process heat loss
- Environment Management
Many manufacturers account for these losses as part of the cost of doing business. However, most medium and smaller manufacturers have not critically explored where and how to reduce their energy footprint by recovering wasted energy or recycling energy from their waste stream.
Most carbon footprint reduction activities focus on reducing consumption, CO2 offsetting and choosing green energy sources. However, there is much more that can be done. Many UK manufacturers don’t have the technical resources to truly get to grips with tackling their energy wastage or developing solutions to recover energy from their waste stream.
Food manufacturers are always innovating and can reduce energy losses by doing things differently?
Efficiencies in conversion technology have made recovering energy from process heat, wastewater or exhaust flues economically viable.
The answer comes from taking a joined-up view, rather than a single wonder application.
Most businesses understand renewable generation, but very few consider energy re-use and energy recovery as a component of their value stream. The relative cost is low and the technology already exists. Developing a solution that suits the site and applying the technology to convert the energy is the revolutionary part.
Total Productivity Solutions views a production facility as the “engine room” of a manufacturing business. Our solutions are all about improving financial efficiency and delivering bottom-line value.
Like any engine it’s all about power. In manufacturing, Revenue is RPM and Profit is Horse Power.
By taking an “engine room” approach, we have helped food manufacturers from the UAE to Hampshire to recycle as much as 60% of their wasted production energy, that would otherwise have gone to trade effluent or atmosphere.
Creating Profit Horsepower From Waste
The 3Rs are super simple
and get everyone involved:
- Reduce
- Re-Use
- Recycle
Reduce Energy Consumption & Reduce Process Wastage
The rising cost of energy and transportation have focused attention and galvanised attitudes.
Manufacturers and their teams must maximise profitability in everything they do.
This is easier said than done. Although for FMCG food manufacturers, where net profits is very small, production volume maximises even the smallest gains.
Reducing process energy automatically increases the value added to the product and maximises profit.
Re-Use Process Waste
Volume production inherently increases the potential for in-process wastage. Although, that isn’t the end of the story.
Good but imperfect product can be reused in secondary product lines.
Process materials like cooking oil can be cleaned and reused. The quicker this is done, the more energy is retained, requiring less energy to reheat it to the required temperature.
Process water that must go to trade effluent can be used to generate electricity, essentially becoming a renewable resource.
Recycle Energy
Most factories operate 24 hours per day, seven days per week.
Even the ones that don’t man those hours incur operating expenses, despite not making anything.
Understanding when energy is being used enables the business to manage how it is used. Monitoring energy consumption in a smart way helps the business take action and where necessary invest with higher returns and lower risks.
Low cost energy can be stored and resold to the Grid during peak times or reused by the business to off-set peak costs.
Waste streams that are unavoidable in order to fulfil food safety compliance can be converted to energy and stored for use at a more profitable time. This is an area that few manufacturing businesses explore, but has been proven to improve profitability. With rising costs the impact will be greater.
Challenging Conventional Thinking Is The Way To Make The Biggest Difference
Our food manufacturing consultants helped a Hampshire food manufacturer apply a holistic view of their operational energy usage as part of a wide spread business improvement initiative and coupled that with some beneficial resources from our UK Business Advisors partners, to enable them to quickly assert commercial advantage; maximising the benefit and shortening the return on investment time.
The results from implementing the 3Rs speak for themselves:
- Energy from Waste Water
- Energy from Heat Recovery
- Extended Life Cooking Oil
- Re-Use of Waste Material
- 14% Saving on Trade Effluent Charges
- 20% Saving on Process Heating Costs
- 75% Component Cost Reduction
- 28% Increased Product Profitability
