Manufacturing

The Chelsea sugar's new sugar purification process has reaped savings in labour, gas and water use and reduced discharges of wastewater, heat and air pollution.

The new process forces sugar liquor through granulated activated carbon in five 62 kilolitre pressurised stainless steel vessels, to remove impurities. It replaced a process that had remained almost unchanged for 120 years.

As a result, NZ Sugar had achieved 13% greenhosue gas emission reduction. The plant is repaying its $7 million cost in just 3.8 years.

Tegel Foods has installed a heat exchanger which is expected to save the company more than $100,000 a year.

With just two years payback, Tegel foods is also expected to save 628 tonnes of CO2 a year.

The plant needs considerable refrigeration and uses a lot of hot water, making it an ideal candidate for a heat recovery system. Refrigeration creates waste energy in the form of heat, while heating large quantities of hot water requires a lot of energy.

The Mt Maunganui-based facility has installed a dual-fuel boiler that has reduced natural gas usage by utilising waste products from their factory. Now they are burning all their waste vegetable oils and tallow. The new boiler reduces their CO2 emissions by 1,378 tonnes per year.

Winemakers Pernod Ricard are set to cut their natural gas bill by $21,000 a year thanks to a new hot-water boiler at the company's Auckland wine-bottling plant.

The $55,000 Northvale boiler is used to heat water for cleaning the equipment at the plant. It is almost 12% more efficient than the steam boiler it replaced, and it is expected to reduce the amount of natural gas the company uses by 479,000 kWh a year.