Positive experience inspires continued effort

• Top 20 analysis highlights measures where energy performance was lacking
• Improvements like reducing compressed air demand (by 20 %) saved on electricity
• Top 20 experience inspired the company to carry on recording energy consumption in detail

For more than 90 years, the Austrian company Destillerie Franz Bauer has produced bottles and sold national and international spirits. The company has about 90 employees and is located not far from the city centre of Graz. The company carried out a Top 20 input-output analysis, which identified high demand for compressed air as a problem area.

Top 20 analysis quantifies flows of different materials and energy in a company. It improves internal accounting of these flows, which shows where companies can better allocate non-product output costs and identify potential for resource efficiency gains within processes. This method has been widely used in clean production projects since the 1990s and recently became an integral part of the EDIT Value method, or 'Eco-innovation Diagnosis and Implementation Tool for enterprise Value', which was developed within the PRESOURCE project (www.presource.eu). EDIT Value, including updated Top 20, was piloted in 18 companies from six European countries.

Following its own Top 20, Franz Bauer further analysed its compressed air consumption and identified several potential areas for improvement, e.g. leaks, pressure losses from narrow pipes, etc.

Key results

Thanks to the analysis and recommendations for improvements, the company could reduce compressed air demand by about 1 000 m3 a year (a 20 % saving). A further recommendation was to heat one of the buildings on the property using waste-heat recovery from an optimised air compressor.

Based on the experience with Top 20, the company elected to carry on with detailed analyses of electricity, water and heat consumption on the site, with the goal of identifying further measures to boost resource efficiency.