Reducing emissions from manufacturing

• ISO 14001 accreditation is considered a pre-requisite for any company committed to doing business in ways that help to protect, preserve and enhance the environment
• It commits us to make continual improvements in our environmental performance.

We are working closely with the Schweppes Abbey Well site, in Morpeth, which we acquired towards the end of 2008,  to align operations there with our environmental management and performance standards.

Our existing sites also have sub-metering so we can monitor how different parts of our factories use energy. This helps us focus our efforts on the areas where we're consuming most energy.

When we invest in new equipment at our manufacturing sites, we make sure that the new technology is more energy efficient than its predecessor. In some cases we have to balance the environmental impacts of new technology against its environmental benefit. For example, air rinsers on our production lines reduce water use, but often lead to increased energy use.

Reporting energy use

During 2010, our manufacturing operations in Great Britain used an average of 84.2 kWh of energy per thousand litres of drinks produced, an 11.25% reduction since 2007.

Climate Change Agreement Scheme

Under the Government's Climate Change Agreement Scheme, we've voluntarily agreed to meet energy reduction targets by 2010 in return for an 80% discount on the Climate Change Levy - an energy tax that would typically add about 15% to the energy bills of UK businesses. CCE has already consistently beaten the targets set under this scheme.

Case Studies

'esKO' Energy Management Training:

Coca-Cola Enterprises'employees from Sidcup and Wakefield have participated in 'esKO' - a Coca-Cola system-wide energy saving program to determine best practices in our facilities. In 2010 a series of training workshops were held for environmental, maintenance and engineering managers on how to use the catalogue and identify future efficiency opportunities, supplementing our existing environmental induction and compliance training.

Energy Efficient Technologies:

We are rolling out new, energy efficient technologies where possible, and in 2010 we focused our investment on new lighting, compressed air and heat recovery.

Compressed air:

We use compressed air throughout our bottling plants, for running our machinery and drying bottles and cans before we use labels.  However, it is expensive and a major use of electricity.  In 2010 we invested £83,716 to reduce leakages, saving 202 tonnes of carbon at our site in Sidcup. 

Lighting:

Over the last two years we have invested on lighting improvements at four sites in Great Britain - Milton Keynes, Sidcup, East Kilbride and Edmonton.

In our Sidcup facility we have £83,716 to replace our standard fluorescent light tubes with new Light Emitting Diode (LED) technology. Each new LED uses a quarter of the energy of a fluorescent tube, so will save 416 MWH of energy per year (one percent of Sidcup's total usage) and around 197 tonnes of CO2 emissions.  As LEDs last longer, we will also make annual maintenance savings of around £3,722.   

Heat recovery:

Following successful pilots, we are also expanding our use of heat recovery.  This works by reusing heat energy from boilers being used for other production processes, so we can then reduce our use of natural gas.  These technologies are catalogued as best practice for the Coca-Cola system and included in our CRS masterplans.

In 2010 we installed a Ground Source Heat pump at our Sidcup plant.  This technology uses the cooling properties of the cold water in the aquifer beneath our plant to cool compressors and bottle blowers instead of using energy from the grid for refrigeration.  We estimate that it will produce year-on-year carbon savings of around 1,612 tonnes and save us £186,114 in energy costs per year.

Renewable Energy:

Although renewable energy technologies tend to be more expensive than traditional fossil energy sources, we believe they will have a part to play in helping us to meet our carbon reduction targets.  By adopting such technologies at an early stage we will help to bring costs down in the longer term.

We continue to explore the most suitable renewable and low-carbon energy solution at each site, depending on geography and location. We are investigating solar panels on our factory and in the car parks at Edmonton and hope to invest in combined heat and power, which would allow us to use waste heat from energy generation in our own processes, in Wakefield.  To implement these projects we must first meet individual planning-related requirements at each site.