The Chesterfield company CBE+ has introduced a number of initiatives aimed at improving the company’s overall efficiency and reducing energy consumption. They range from the installation of a state-of-the-art effluent treatment plant to incentives aimed at encouraging staff to come up with ways to reduce energy consumption.
Chief Executive Marie Cooper says that it is all part of a strategy aimed at achieving greater sustainability and minimising the company’s environmental impact.
“The effluent treatment plant treats all the company’s process waste,” Ms Cooper said, “automatically filtering and neutralizing the waste chemicals generated on site, and allowing for their safe disposal. The incentives on energy saving are aimed at changing the way CBE+ staff think about energy use at work. For every £1 the business saves on energy, 50p is put in a profit share scheme and the other 50p is reinvested in the business.”
Ms Cooper says that the scheme is contributing to a reduction in the company’s energy bills.
“Keeping costs down is a necessity in today’s economic climate,” she said. “We are now much more mindful of how we can impact energy usage on a day-to-day basis.”
A major part of the overall energy reduction strategy at CBE+ is the £0.75 million investment in a new Combined Heat and Power system, which has been developed in conjunction with the Sheffield company Levercor Energy.
The CHP plant will deliver over 90% of the site’s electrical requirements, producing enough electrical energy to run the factory, including the milling and turning centres, which manufacture complex components for the oil and gas and aerospace sectors. It will provide process heat to the electroless nickel plating production lines, as well as heating the workshop. The system is replacing a large gas-fired thermal oil boiler and 10 gas space heaters, and is expected to result in an overall carbon reduction of around 50%.
But apart from the significant investments in the effluent treatment plant and the new CHP system, Ms Cooper said that there were what she called “easy wins”, relatively simple initiatives which do not require major investment, but which have the potential to make their own small contribution towards achieving the common goal of Net Zero.
“Apart from our staff incentives on energy saving,” she said, “we have also installed motion sensor LED lights, which automatically turn off when people leave a room. We added recycling bins to our offices and canteen. We started to segregate more of our scrap materials for recycling. We introduced reusable packaging. We fixed compressed air leaks on the shop floor. We insulated more of our production process tanks. It turns out, a lot of small things can make a big difference.”
