Five steps to reduce water and cleaning chemical consumption in food and beverage production
Water plays an important role in the food and beverage industry, whether as an ingredient or a key part of manufacturing and cleaning processes. As a producer operating in an increasingly resource-scarce and regulated environment, reducing your consumption of water and cleaning chemicals is essential in order to meet your sustainability targets and reduce your operational costs.
The best way to start is by identifying where the greatest potential for improvements lies. A sustainability assessment provides a clear understanding of your equipment and processes, as well as establishing a baseline from which to improve them. We can work together to identify potential quick wins and longer-term improvement areas, including ways to reduce water consumption and recycle used process water.
Here are five practical steps for reducing your water and chemical consumption, offering five different, but not mutually exclusive, ways to approach this issue.
The first approach is to implement modern, resource-efficient equipment that helps minimise the amount of water and chemicals needed for your production and cleaning.
Since UHT technologies are an important area for dairy producers seeking to save water, our latest Tetra Pak® Direct UHT unit has been designed to meet these demands, offering premium quality, enhanced flexibility, and a high level of efficiency. Thanks to its compact design, it reduces the demand for fresh water by up to 6%. Additionally, the unique design of its steam injector, flash vessel, and condenser permits chemical savings of up to 37%.1
Meanwhile, our integrated best-practice lines are designed to increase output and improve resource efficiency with a lower total cost of ownership. For example, the best-practice line for juice, nectar, and still drinks can help achieve savings of up to 67% in energy and up to 50% in water. Compared to a conventional setup where the entire product stream is pasteurised, this system heat-treats only the concentrate, treats water with UV light and filtration, and reduces the full system volume in your pasteuriser, leaving you with less equipment to clean.
Another effective approach to saving water is to recover process water and chemicals from production and reuse them. Traditional food processing often results in wastewater being washed down the drain, but with the right technologies in place, wastewater can be reused for equipment cleaning or even in food processing.
Membrane filtration technologies such as reverse osmosis and nano-filtration allow you to recover and reuse wastewater during food processing, reducing both your water consumption and effluent discharge. Flush water, for instance, can be purified by filtration for reuse – either for cleaning purposes or for use in the product itself. Chemicals used for cleaning-in-place can be separated from flush water and reused, allowing the purified water to be recycled in the process.
A third approach to reducing water and chemicals consumption is to optimise the efficiency of your current equipment through upgrades. A Tetra Pak® Water Filtering Station, for instance, can save up to 95% of the wastewater created by your filling machine.2 It removes lubrication, residues from packaging material, hydrogen peroxide, and alkaline pH before circulating clean water, free from contaminants, back into the system.
In addition, we offer multiple upgrades to enhance water recovery. Using circular systems such as the ECO cooling homogeniser reduces water consumption by up to ~6,750 m3 per year by recovering cooling water from the homogeniser in a closed loop.3 Similarly, the ECO cooling on deaerator condenser, used on the Tetra Pak® Indirect UHT units and in Tetra Pak® Pasteurizers, reduces water consumption by up to 10,240 m3 per year with a closed loop system that recirculates cooling water.4
One further water-saving upgrade that can be applied to both pasteurisers and UHT equipment is hibernation mode.5 If there is a time gap between pre-sterilisation and production, the unit can be set to automatically hibernate, which reduces the amount of cooling water used during sterile water circulation by up to 60%.
You can learn more about equipment upgrades that help reduce water, energy and waste here (link to pdf to be inserted)
Since cleaning accounts for a large proportion of the total water consumption in modern food production plants, this is another good place to look for savings. Efficient cleaning systems are designed to minimise water use while ensuring high hygiene and food safety standards.
Smart plant components such as the ThinkTop V50 and V70 can save you up to 90% on water, chemicals, heating and wastewater during CIP of mixproof or drain valves.6 This is thanks to the ThinkTop's intuitive, intelligent valve control, self-diagnostics, and rapid burst cleaning.
Even the smallest machine parts can make a big difference to your water consumption, with seemingly simple elements like nozzles and sprayers enabling savings. Using rotary jet heads for tank cleaning, for example, provides powerful cleaning with a 360° repeatable indexed pattern that ensures complete coverage of the tank walls. It uses less water than traditional spray balls, ultimately reducing cleaning time and saving up to 70% on cleaning costs.7
Having made improvements to your equipment and processes, implementing the right automation and digital solutions will help you monitor and optimise water usage on an ongoing basis.
Asset Health Monitoring (AHM) is a data-driven collaboration service that continuously monitors and analyses specific equipment's electricity, water, and compressed air consumption, highlighting deviations and suggesting the best response based on your current operating conditions. AHM takes a ground-up holistic approach, including off-the-shelf solutions for specific Tetra Pak equipment as well as customised sensor kits and user interface, and a secure network designed for your Tetra Pak equipment.
To get a more top-down view, the reporting module in our automation and digital platform, Tetra Pak® PlantMaster, provides cleaning reports that include real-time and historical data on the amount of water, caustic, and flush with fresh water consumed during cleaning. Any deviations that may require action are highlighted, helping you ensure the highest possible cleaning efficiency.
Are you interested in saving water and chemicals in your operations?
The above five steps are broad approaches for reducing water and chemical use in your food and beverage manufacturing operations, with concrete suggestions for implementing them. Get in touch today, and our experts will work with you to identify the key areas for water and chemical savings across your operations.
1 Tetra Pak Business-to-Business Research on Planetary Challenges and Their Impact on Food and Beverage Manufacturers, 2023, n= 346
2 https://food.ec.europa.eu/horizontal-topics/farm-fork-strategy_en
3 Typical production scenario based on on-site experience of customers’ protein powder processing. 300 working days/yr, 35,000kg batch size, 4 batches/day and a €6/kg DM product cost.
4 Using reverse osmosis solution, compared to not using any recovery solutions.
5 Compared with machine without hibernation, running at nominal capacity (15000l/h). The exact % savings are equipment dependent.
6 Based on filling machine running 4,000 hrs/yr without the kit installed
7 https://www.tetrapak.com/insights/cases-articles/how-automation-improves-efficiency-quality-waste