Anadolu Efes is committed to sustainability, aiming for net zero emissions and zero-waste certification by 2030, while reducing water consumption.
Sustainability is firmly anchored in the Turkish beverage company’s business strategy, which includes targets for greenhouse gas emissions (net zero by 2030) and waste generated (zero-waste certification for its malt and beer business by 2030).
A stable supply of water plays a vital role here since a brewery’s business depends on it not only directly, but also indirectly since barley and hops also need water to grow. That’s why Anadolu Efes records the water-stress risk, meaning the balance between the quantity of water demanded and available in the region concerned, for all its beer, malt and hops production sites across the globe. The operations in Türkiye, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Georgia aim to reduce water consumption per beer production by 10% in breweries by 2025 compared to the 2020 baseline. To achieve this, Anadolu Efes pulled plenty of different levers in its production.
Pasteuriser upgrades for water saving
Anadolu Efes identified the pasteuriser as one area with considerable potential for water savings and has taken Krones on board to tackle it. “Of course, it would be possible to simply replace the older systems with new ones. But in terms of sustainability, an upgrade is the better solution,” says Jan Golm from the Krones Lifecycle Service team. You must look at how a pasteuriser works to understand how such an upgrade cuts consumption. The filled product is cold when it enters the machine. As it passes through all sections of the pasteuriser, it’s showered with water at different temperatures. The temperature of the process water rises or falls, depending on the section concerned. In normal operation, the process water is passed back and forth between specific section pairs. If everything is running smoothly, the pasteuriser does not need any additional energy nor any fresh water from outside.
The situation is different if there’s a line stoppage and the product is stuck inside the machine. To prevent over-pasteurisation, the product must be rapidly cooled with fresh water, which thereafter is usually flushed right down the drain. When the line is started up again, there will of course be no hot water from the discharge sections for warming up the product entering the machine. Hence, the pasteuriser will need additional thermal energy.
Centralised thermal and cooling
A central supply of thermal and cooling energy permits efficient resource management even in such conditions. Instead of having to rapidly heat or cool the several cubic metres of water that are usually passed between the respective section pairs, using lots of fresh water or thermal energy along the way, a faster and more efficient method is to keep hot or cold process water available in central buffer tanks. Water at exactly the right temperature for showering the containers in the section concerned can then be taken from those tanks, subsequently collected and passed back into the tanks.
To integrate this concept into Anadolu Efes’ existing pasteurisers, Krones installed two upgrade packages: firstly, the CHESS system, consisting of a central heat exchanger and hot water tank, and secondly a buffer tank for cold water. Together, these retrofits can reduce water consumption by at least 20 per cent, in some cases by quite a lot more than that. “The hot buffer is always kept at the rated temperature, for instance at 60 degrees Celsius. The water then only needs to be heated slightly more for use, typically to 80 or 85 degrees Celsius. That doesn’t take much time and requires less energy,” emphasises Jan Golm. In a similar approach, the cold buffer can be complemented by a cooling tower, for instance the Krones VapoChill, and permanently cooled. In that case, the pasteuriser can practically do without fresh water entirely.
The retrofit job at Anadolu Efes covered one Krones and three third-party pasteurisers. All upgrade packages comprised the CHESS central heat exchanger supply system, buffer tanks for cold and hot water, plus a cooling tower with heat exchanger. “The water volume we’re saving even exceeds our expectations,” says Efe Göktepe, head of filling and packaging at the Anadolu Efes brewery in Izmir, giving us some impressive figures: Daily consumption (24 hours) decreases by 90 per cent from 250 to 15 cubic metres.
