Sustainability projects boost process efficiency

The ther­mo­dy­nam­ics spe­cial­ist hotset is di­rect­ing its busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ties in­creas­ing­ly to­wards the prin­ci­ples of sus­tain­abil­i­ty and cli­mate pro­tec­tion. One of the for­ward-look­ing im­puls­es for this is its par­tic­i­pa­tion in the net­work project “Öko­prof­it” of the re­gion­al busi­ness ini­tia­tive “Sus­tain­able Econ­o­my MK”. Read here about how the company’s ac­tiv­i­ties in this field are open­ing up more and more op­por­tu­ni­ties for in­ter­nal process optimization.

“Our heat­ing el­e­ments, sen­sors and con­trol sys­tems con­tribute to the en­er­gy-ef­fi­cient, low-waste op­er­a­tion of tech­ni­cal process­es wher­ev­er they are used. It is there­fore on­ly log­i­cal that, in anal­o­gy to this, we con­tin­u­al­ly re-align many of our in­ter­nal process­es and meth­ods with the re­quire­ments of sus­tain­abil­i­ty, ecol­o­gy and cli­mate pro­tec­tion,” says Philipp Gang­hoff. The pro­duc­tion man­ag­er at hotset has been de­vot­ing him­self to this spe­cial type of op­ti­miza­tion work for quite some time now. He and his col­leagues have al­ready im­ple­ment­ed a num­ber of con­crete mea­sures to low­er the company’s en­er­gy con­sump­tion and re­duce ma­te­r­i­al us­age. For in­stance, new, en­er­gy-ef­fi­cient pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ties were put in­to op­er­a­tion and parts clean­ing was con­vert­ed to dry process­es. Large ar­eas of ad­min­is­tra­tion and as­sem­bly were equipped with eco­nom­i­cal LED light­ing and the build­ings of the main plant in Lü­den­scheid re­ceived a new, high­ly ef­fi­cient heat­ing sys­tem. The fa­cades now have mod­ern ther­mal in­su­la­tion. The company’s car fleet has al­so been con­vert­ed to elec­tric and hy­brid ve­hi­cles and more charg­ing sta­tions have been in­stalled on the hotset premis­es. What’s more, in al­most all de­part­ments, the con­sump­tion of op­er­at­ing ma­te­ri­als and the vol­ume of waste have been sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duced. Philipp Gang­hoff al­so points to the con­sid­er­able re­duc­tion in the con­sump­tion of pa­per and print­er car­tridges as a par­tic­u­lar­ly il­lus­tra­tive ex­am­ple of this: “Across the com­pa­ny, we cur­rent­ly print about half a mil­lion sheets of pa­per an­nu­al­ly. In 2022, we will re­duce pa­per out­put by half. Not on­ly does this re­sult in enor­mous sav­ings in pur­chas­ing, but al­so in a mas­sive re­duc­tion in print­ing costs,” em­pha­sis­es the hotset man­ag­er. As a con­se­quence, many pa­per­less process­es can now be es­tab­lished, and a lot of un­pro­duc­tive time has al­so been eliminated.

Im­pe­tus for the transformation
The re­gion­al eco­nom­ic ini­tia­tive Nach­haltige Wirtschaft MK (Sus­tain­able Econ­o­my MK) has proven to be an im­por­tant dri­ving force for hotset’s sus­tain­abil­i­ty work. It was launched in 2020 by the cities of Al­te­na, Lü­den­scheid and Wer­dohl and the Gesellschaft zur Wirtschafts- und Struk­tur­förderung (GWS) in Märkisch­er Kreis and now serves as an in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary plat­form for the trans­fer of know-how and ex­per­tise for nu­mer­ous com­pa­nies from var­i­ous sec­tors. Philipp Gang­hoff is in­volved here on be­half of hotset in work­shops and dis­cus­sion rounds, in which is­sues per­tain­ing to waste dis­pos­al tech­nol­o­gy, en­er­gy tech­nol­o­gy or the al­lo­ca­tion of sub­si­dies are dis­cussed, for ex­am­ple. “We of­ten re­ceive in­ter­est­ing sug­ges­tions for our trans­for­ma­tion process­es in these rounds. In this con­text, shar­ing ex­pe­ri­ences with oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies in par­tic­u­lar en­ables us to spec­i­fy our own con­sid­er­a­tions and im­ple­ment them more quick­ly in con­crete projects,” re­ports the hotset manager.