Tetra Pak introduces sustainable factory solutions

Tetra Pak has unveiled its Factory Sustainable Solutions offering, a new factory-wide approach to optimizing energy, water and clean-in-place (CIP).

Factory Sustainable Solutions offers food and beverage (F&B) manufacturers a tailored combination of technology and leading plant integration capabilities. It aims to support food and beverage manufacturers in optimizing their energy and resource use, an important step in helping customers meet their sustainability ambitions and reduce operational costs.

Food and beverage producers, traditionally dependent on fossil fuels and energy-intensive processes, are under increasing pressure to optimize resources and increase renewable energy production. This comes in the face of rising operating costs, including raw material costs, as well as new CO2 taxes and fees for wasted water. Finding solutions to these challenges will be crucial as companies look to their supply chains and production processes to help achieve savings.

Complementing its portfolio of resource-efficient equipment and services, Tetra Pak’s Factory Sustainable Solutions embody a systematic, factory-wide approach. Solutions can be integrated at any stage to recover and reduce the consumption of resources such as energy, water and chemicals. Optimized resource use reduces long-term operating costs and associated greenhouse gas emissions while supporting compliance with increasingly stringent sustainability standards.

The Tetra Pak Factory Sustainable Solutions team will support customers in finding the right technologies and integration solutions to suit their needs, advising them on the best practice setup for their line or facility. The result is a customized piping and installation scheme that provides water, power and CIP according to the specific needs of the client’s operation.

Tetra Pak’s sustainable factory solutions portfolio includes:

• Nanofiltration, which recovers the corrosive cleaning fluid used for CIP. This solution, developed by Tetra Pak, allows the recovery of clean chemicals and water for future reuse, enabling the recovery of up to 90% of the total used liquid.
• Reverse osmosiswhich uses patented membrane filtration technology developed by Tetra Pak to improve resource efficiency in many applications, including milk separation and water reuse.

Tetra Pak also works with technology partners to offer additional solutions, including:

• HighLift heat pump technology in partnership with Olvondo Technology A/S, which can be integrated into operations to facilitate the reuse of waste heat to produce steam in the plant’s equipment, including the Tetra Pak Direct UHT unit, at a pressure of up to 10 bar.
• High-temperature heat pumps in partnership with Johnson Controls that elevate waste heat conversion cycles for use elsewhere in the factory.
• The solar collectors, in collaboration with Absolicon, use the sun as an unlimited source of clean and renewable energy to power hot water and steam – with temperatures above 150°C – making them suitable for UHT applications.

“This launch is an incredibly exciting and significant milestone for us at Tetra Pak, especially for our team who have worked hard to push the boundaries of impact and value this approach can bring to our customers,” says Nicole Uvenbeck, Director Factory Sustainable solutions and components OEM, Tetra Pak. “Until now, our main focus had been on machine and line optimization and we realized the huge benefits of replicating this at factory level, providing a more holistic approach to optimization. Factory Sustainable Solutions is an evolution of our expertise in water, energy and CIP recovery. Together, this will redefine how we support our customers in achieving their sustainability ambitions, while reducing their operational costs.