Projectname:
Evaluation method for the sustainability of a processing machine during use phase
Workgroup: Filling and packaging processes
Forschungsstelle und wissenschaftliche Betreuung:
Financing: IVLV e. V.
Duration: 2024
A key challenge to achieve climate protection goals such as greenhouse gas neutrality by 2045 is for Germany as an industrial site the transformation towards a sustainable economy by the reduction of resource consumption and environmental pollution. Therefore, a sustainable production by reduction of resources is becoming increasingly important for companies in the processing industry. Since 2017 the obligation to submit a sustainability report is being extended starting from large companies, so that numerous SMEs are also going to be obligated to prepare such reports from 2026 onwards. The report includes indicators to evaluate the sustainability of investments and the ongoing production. Currently various methods with over 500 indicators exist for evaluating the sustainability. This results in a great effort to prepare such reports, especially for SMEs with little experience in the evaluation process. Sustainability evaluations are also often based on data from databases. Plant- and machine-specific information is often missing and thus can deviate from the actual process data. Consequently, no standardized and transferable method exists for evaluating the sustainability of various processes in the food and packaging industry.
The objective of the project is the development of a method to be used by companies in the food and packaging industry for the comprehensive, valid evaluation of the production processes sustainability of processing machines during their use phase, including side processes such as cleaning. The method is validated by a case study in production. Key aspects are:
The development of a comprehensible method supports companies in the processing and packaging industry to evaluate sustainability indicators and to realize individual solutions for ecologically optimizing their processes. In addition, SMEs can expect further benefits from a comprehensible evaluation of the sustainability in production: