Manufacturer curbs electricity costs

Woven fabric manufacturer Beaulieu Pacific Pty Ltd spent two years trying to find ways to reduce carbon emissions and electricity consumption, but with little success.

General Manager Steve Bamford said the Acacia Ridge, Queensland-based manufacturer wanted to implement more sustainable processes. “We knew electricity costs needed to be reduced, but couldn’t identify what was causing the high costs. We didn’t know where to start.”

Fortunately, Beaulieu Pacific was introduced to QMI Solutions, which conducted a very thorough study of its electricity usage and were able to reduce consumption such as:

• peak costs by up to $1000 p/m
• supplier demand costs by 22%, or $34K annually, after renegotiating its contract
• peak kilowatts per hour (kWh) charge from 10.517c to 5.335c
• off-peak kWh rate by about 40%, from 4.024 cents to 2.471c
• average peak demand from 335 kWh to 280 kWh

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Tools of the Green Manufacturing Trade

Environmental Leader has run a series of articles on greener manufacturing, or as I prefer to call it 'Sustainable Manufacturing'. This is Part 1 of that series. Author David Dornfield argues 'sustainability' is the destination and 'green manufacturing' is the journey. Certainly in our experience with SMEs, the term 'green manufacturing' has more of a stigma than 'sustainable manufacturing'.

This article mentions two key obstacles to implementing sustainable manufacturing initiatives: the business model and in-house capability and then identifies some useful tools, as recommended by the OECD, in approaching the sustainable manufacturing challenge.

Click here to read the full article.