The Prince's Mayday Network

Reducing factory carbon emissions

Introduction

Agfa Graphics saved £100,000 manufacturing costs and reduced CO2 by 3% per unit output in the factory by investing in new technology, in support of ISO 14001 and PPC permit commitments.

Process

What and How:

Agfa Graphics, worldwide manufacturers of lithographic printing plates, are reducing the energy consumption in their factories and as such the manufacturing costs. This aligns with their commitment to reduce the environmental impact of the company’s operations.
The following investments and improvements were undertaken:
- Installed waste heat recovery systems on the first and second production lines in 2007 and 2008 respectively; reducing the requirement of heating water with gas. Both projects combined have reduced gas consumption by over 1,000 MWh per annum;
- Installation of energy efficient lighting and automated lighting controls;
- Trialling the use of waste process heat as a mode of factory space heating;
- The manufacturing process parameters are tuned to improve energy efficiency upon the introduction of new products;
- Introduction of webinar technology for intra-company meetings with France rather than travel.
The biggest challenge was recognising the opportunity of the waste heat. Process monitoring of our cooling towers to improve their performance highlighted the previously unmeasured and hence unrecognised magnitude of heat being released into the atmosphere. Prior to this process monitoring, the waste process heat was viewed as a necessary by-product that had to be removed efficiently. Agfa Graphics now consider it a resource, rather than waste. Consultation with Carbon Trust helped them to design an efficient way to re-use this heat in our process thus reducing gas consumption. The design and implementation of the resulting engineering solutions was relatively simple.

Impact

Reduced gas consumption in 2007 on the main production line by 66% through the first heat recovery project. This reduced annual costs by around £60,000 for a £28,000 investment

Energy reduction of 3% in 2008 relative to 2007 CO2 emissions, saving approximately £100,000

Won two awards; IMechE MX2007 Arup Award for Sustainable Manufacturing (for the general approach to managing manufacturing sites), and the 2008 Business Commitment to the Environment Premier Process Award