Energy

Measures with a cost-recovery time of less than 5 years have been mandatory since 1999. By far not all measures have been taken - for various reasons - also because energy savings was not always the highest priority for authorities, and also because there was a lack of knowledge at local government level. However, the authorities have started a catch-up in the area of energy savings. This recently resulted in the list of “approved energy measures for the food industry”. Many companies will be faced with this list during enforcement inspections over the next few years.

As well as the legal obligation to reduce energy consumption, many companies also subscribe to this from a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) aspect. The pressure from society - and from customers - to be transparent about the carbon footprint is constantly increasing. It has become a common challenge to reduce the CO2 emission per tonne of end product ever further.

Environmental experts are not usually energy experts. The energy experts are mechanical engineers, process technologists, refrigeration technicians and the like, while the environmental people are experts in areas like waste water, odour, noise and lots of legislation. Thankfully, the energy people and the environment people are working together in one team at RBK, so there is easy exchange of knowledge and energy aspects are always fully included in environmental issues.

Van Loon Vlees in Son was the first company building we designed to operate without the use of gas. All heat for warming up the cleaning water (circa 200 m³/d) is entirely from residual heat from the refrigeration installation. We can design high-quality technical solutions against reasonable cost in BREEAM, keeping the cost recovery time under 5 years.