Product and Water Saving – Measured and Delivered
23 August 2007
Reliable, competitive and efficient production and plant hygiene, are essential to keep up with ever-growing market demands and ensure competitiveness. Important factors for better plant economy include future-oriented technologies, high plant availability, long service life, and constant optimisation in all relevant areas.
The OptiSave tool is installed in the cleaning centre and connected to the Cleaning In Place (CIP) return pipe via hoses. To increase uptime and reduce customers' operational costs in dairy plants, Tetra Pak has developed a new intelligent service product, Product and Water Saving, for measuring and evaluating the product, water and cleaning material losses in dairy plants during CIP.
Product and Water Saving also focuses on possible improvements. The service carries out analysis-based optimisations, to minimise or eliminate waste, thereby generating large savings and reducing the environmental impact.
ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS
The world is waking up to the importance of bringing environmental aspects into everything we do and the need to start changing our habits, on the personal level as well as corporate levels. Authorities all over the world are requiring more and accurate information from producers about their waste management and environmental impact.
The Product and Water Saving development project was initiated to help customers obtain information about their waste discharge and media consumption. An added benefit of the service is that it provides which part of production the waste derives from, and the plan it delivers for remedying unnecessary waste and media consumption.
Product and water saving is divided into three steps: define scope and conditions, measure and analyze, and improve and control.
The OptiSave tool (based on a patented method) is used to measure the losses. It is installed in the cleaning centre and connected to the CIP return pipe via hoses.
OptiSave shows, in real-time, the cleaning parameters for each object during the cleaning process. It covers such factors as product losses, fresh water consumption and losses, cleaning solution losses, cleaning times and temperatures.
The optimisation can be carried out either by Tetra Pak service specialists working with the customer's staff to ensure Tetra Pak and the customer jointly benefit from the savings, or by the customer themselves.
The offer from Tetra Pak consists of a suitable engineering solution, for example; changing timers, adjusting valve functions, reducing excessive rinsing or replacing a CIP R pump with one of a suitable capacity. This results in savings in product, water, cleaning solutions and waste cost, with benefits to both the bottom line and the environment. One example of a possible saving is the shortening of plant downtimes due to CIP.
OPTIMISATION RESULTS
Tetra Pak's product and water saving service is especially suitable for plants where the number of products increases and where plant cleaning has not been continuously adjusted to new requirements. Furthermore, during commissioning of a new plant cleaning system, Product and Water Saving can be used to optimise CIP from start-up.
"Even very small changes in cleaning parameters, switching times, cleaning programmes or in operator behaviour can generate significant cost savings," says Jôrgen Melin, technical sales and service director of Tetra Pak Dairy & Beverage Systems AB. "In particular, reduction in cleaning times can lead to extended uptime and thereby increased production capacity," he says.
"We have found the product and water saving service from Tetra Pak very useful because the measurements detected mistakes in our production," said customer Friesland Foods in Germany. "The presentation of recommendations from Tetra Pak, which originated from the measurements, was also very good and will improve our plant performance."
