Where are energy, water and product being lost in your operation?
A utility bill shows how much energy or water a plant has used. It rarely shows why.
A loss can sit inside processes that appear to be running normally. Steam leaves as waste heat. Water is discharged after one use. Cleaning settings keep drawing on utilities long after production needs have changed.
Finding the opportunity for better resource use means tracing what happens to energy and water once it enters the process.
When the heat is already there
Several customers in Spain were facing rising energy costs on UHT lines operating in direct mode. The production requirement stayed the same, to reduce energy use without changing product quality or running time.
The existing lines were assessed and upgraded to add an indirect UHT mode. Changes were also made to the control cabinet and mix phase. Product loss can occur during mix-phase changeovers as water and product pass through the system together. Tightening that transition can keep more product in production, avoiding loss.
Across seven lines, energy consumption fell by 70% per line, primarily through lower steam use. Product quality and running time were reported as unchanged. The investment paid back within a few months.
That assessment opened up another question around heat, once energy has entered the process, how much of it leaves without being used again?
A beverage manufacturer was seeing high steam consumption on an existing pasteurizer. A product-to-product regeneration upgrade allowed heat from one product stream to be transferred to another.
In this case, the change saved around 969,000 kg of steam a year. That equated to a 30% reduction under the stated running conditions and an annual operating-cost saving of €37,000.
Both examples started with the same piece of work: understand where the energy goes before deciding what needs changing.
Water does not always need to leave the process
Energy is one resource that goes unnoticed until someone traces it. Water follows the same pattern, but the fix isn't always the same.
At a plant-based beverage producer in Spain, water used by compressors on the filling equipment was being discharged after use. Filtering stations were installed to remove hydrogen peroxide residues so the water could return to the filling machines.
The recycling rate increased by up to 95%. Based on the plant’s 2023 production activity, that saved 12.9 million litres of water a year.
Elsewhere, the issue was not disposal. It was how the plant was being controlled.
A dairy in a water-scarce region of the Middle East was running with older control platforms. Communication between the production and cleaning equipment was limited, and the plant was using unnecessary volumes of water and chemicals.
Upgrades to the controls and cleaning equipment included a water-plug function for the rinse stage. Rinse-water volume fell by 90%. Annual water use fell by 10 million litres, while chemical consumption fell by around 6%.
Cleaning and rinse stages can also be a source of product loss. Looking at where water and product meet can reveal opportunities to keep more saleable product in production, even when the main measured benefit is lower water use.
The two plants were losing the same resource for different reasons. One needed a way to reuse water that was already available. The other needed tighter control over how much water the process called for.
Let the resource loss define the upgrade
That is why resource optimisation starts with your existing operation rather than a predefined solution.
Trace where the steam goes. Follow the water after use. Look at what happens during cleaning or a production changeover. The same is true of product itself, a mix-phase changeover can send saleable output straight out of the process.
Once the source of the loss is identified, the upgrade has a specific job to do.
Pick one high-use area in your plant and trace what happens to the resource there. If you cannot see where the loss is coming from, talk to us about what an assessment could uncover and whether a targeted upgrade could address it.