Project Overview
Hatlar Group has undertaken an assessment of Clean in Place (CIP) systems at 10 medium to large sized food businesses in metropolitan Melbourne. The assessment looks to optimise the CIP systems and use the outcomes of this work as the basis for development of innovative and practical best practice guidelines for CIP assessment and optimisation.
The key objective of the project is to identify and evaluate the optimisation options for CIP systems that will generate direct reductions in water demand and critical pollutant loads to trade waste at each of the 10 sites.
Hatlar Group has completed the development of the Clean-In-Place Best Practice Guide to help the food and beverage industry to save thousands of litres of water each year.
The Guide provides information about the range of cost-effective techniques that the industry can adopt to minimise their water and chemical use during Clean in Place (CIP) – a critical cleaning process that is generally water intensive and high in sodium.
The Guide is part of an overall strategy to curb heavy water use across the industry, and to encourage companies to prioritise resource efficiency in the production process.
“Through our work with the industry we found recurring issues with CIP system efficiencies,” said project team member James Macdonald.
“There are plenty of options from low cost and simple changes to operational controls to sophisticated and innovative techniques that can reduce waste water generation. ”
“We saw an opportunity for companies to make fairly easy gains by improving their CIP processes to reduce water, chemicals, time and energy by 30 to 50 per cent. And of course, the significant short and long-term financial gains are attractive,” Mr Macdonald said.
Hatlar Group held several workshops as part of the Smart Water Fund project to give the industry the opportunity to provide their feedback on the Guide, as well as to encourage companies to take its recommendations on board.
“The industry has received the Guide really well, and it’s encouraging to see that they’re taking on board initiatives to reduce their reliance on water and other resources,” Mr Macdonald said.
