Food Engineering
May, 2011
Take action now to reduce consumption by monitoring energy usage in real time.
Don’t consider being sustainable altruistic. Today, consumers expect businesses to show respect for the environment by decreasing waste and greenhouse gases and saving electricity and water. But more important to processors, sustainable management of resources means a better bottom line and more profitability.
Conserving resources is good for everyone. Saving water, for example, is becoming especially critical. According to the World Health Organization, less than 1 percent of the world’s fresh water (or about 0.007 percent of all water on earth) is readily accessible for direct human use.
But being able to track the sustainability of an operation requires careful planning and the right tools. Assuming a manufacturer has the right hardware in place to track processes, adding software tools to monitor the sustainability of a plant is a lesser issue than adapting a plant that has few or no sensors or instrumentation in place. Of the software tools dedicated specifically to monitoring utilities and energy consumption, processors will find lots of choices. Some software tools can also calculate energy saved in units of greenhouse gases (GHGs).
Getting on bandwagon
When Darryl Wernimont, POWER Engineers market specialist for the food and beverage industries, worked for a large A&E/C (architectural and engineering/construction) firm, his experience with food processors was that in 2001, one out of 100 clients typically asked about green/sustainable initiatives. Ten years later, practically every processor he meets wants to discuss sustainability. Processors realize, says Wernimont, “green” is no longer a unique differentiator in consumers’ eyes; it has become an expectation much like safety and security.
“We still find that many firms are collecting sustainability data manually—and largely for the purpose of reporting to external stakeholders,” says Sean Robinson, GE Intelligent Platforms food and beverage industry manager. While this does create awareness of overall usage, it doesn’t provide the base of data needed to drive understanding of what controllable factors a producer can address to reduce its consumption.
“Many manufacturing companies are still in the early stages of developing or implementing their sustainability strategies,” says Jay Zoellner, EPS president and CEO. “This is new territory for most of them, and many are struggling to achieve the level of results they set in their targets.” Zoellner says three barriers, identified in an April, 2010 Pew Center for Global Climate Change Report, make it tough to get started; these are organizational, informational and resource obstacles. The right software—coupled with a supplier that can provide consultation and supporting hardware—can make the task of overcoming these barriers much easier.