Challenge description

Description of the Challenge Large-scale process industries, such as agrofood, milk and beverage processing, are required to deploy the best available technology to reduce their impact on the local environment and reduce their contribution to sectoral and national carbon emissions. Current CIP systems consume large quantities of energy, water and cleaning chemicals and generate large quantities of effluent requiring expensive treatment in wastewater treatment plants. Reducing the resources used by CIP systems is the key challenge.
Context

Approximately one third of the water consumed in a modern milk processing plant is used by Cleaning –in-Place (CIP) systems for the cleaning and sanitising of milk contact surfaces; vessels, pipelines and equipment. Large quantities of a range of expensive cleaning and sanitising chemicals are used in the make-up in of cleaning solutions in CIP plants. Post cleaning the spent cleaning solutions have to be neutralised and broken down in effluent treatment plants.
The recovery and re-use of CIP chemicals would significantly reduce the volume of water used in CIP make-up.
Fundamental requirements and constraints

A prerequisite for such a closed loop system would be that it was robust enough to operate continuously on-demand under the high temperature, pH and high circulation flow rates of a central CIP system and have a low maintenance requirement.
The system would need to be easily retro-fitted to an existing CIP system, be equipped with all the sensors necessary to facilitate high level automation and networking with local CIP and factory process control systems.
Another requirement would be that the direct savings, by way of reduced usage of CIP chemicals, would need to off-set the operational cost of the recovery and remediation process and achieve a return on capital invested in less than 5 years.
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Country Ireland

Contact informations

Name of the organisation Lakeland Dairies
Brief overview

Lakeland Dairies, a major dairy processing co-operative, operates within a nineteen county catchment area across the northern half of the island of Ireland. The Group processes about 1.8 billion litres of quality milk annually into a range of value added dairy foodservice products and functional dairy food ingredients.
Website: www.lakeland.ie
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