Engineering a greener future

Express Engineering has once again teamed up with the Carbon Trust to dramatically improve its green credentials – saving money in the process, which is being ploughed back into business development.

Since we began measuring our Energy and CO2 usage in 2007 we’ve reduced our Energy usage and CO2 emissions by around 12% - that’s 107 tonnes of CO2 – We reduced the compressor usage by 20% helping to reduce the total overall electricity usage by 6% and we reduced our gas usage by 42%. So even though we have installed new plant and equipment and also expanded into a third factory – we have still made these significant Energy savings.

The Carbon Trust is so impressed with our efforts that it is using us as a case study to increase awareness of the benefits of improving environmental performance. 

The green drive began in January 2007 with the appointment of an environmental geoscience graduate from Edinburgh University to work in partnership with our Environmental Team and the Carbon Trust to drive down waste, reduce energy usage and CO2 emissions and to save money. We also started work towards our ISO14001 accreditation which we received in 2008.

The initial results we achieved were through carrying out a series of energy awareness presentations with all of our employees and we realised an immediate reduction of almost 60% in land fill waste and 5% savings on electricity use for the compressor.  Subsequently Carbon Trust grants helped pay for new compressor equipment - which has delivered further savings of around 20% - and the installation of a new gas space heating control system to maintain a constant temperature has shown additional gas savings of over 30%.

We again sought advice from the Carbon Trust for the energy efficient lighting and heating in the additional 18,000 sq. ft. of space recently taken on for our expansion and we received interest free loans to help pay for their installation

The new energy efficient lights also have daylight saving and movement sensors which will save on lighting costs.  In addition, due to the longer life of the bulbs, significant savings will be made in replacement and fitting costs, The high efficiency gas space heaters with temperature controls should also minimize our gas usage and CO2 emissions

Said Production Manager, Dave Fullen, who leads on the energy initiative:  “Managing our energy use to become a more efficient and environmentally friendly operation is a key part of our improvement and expansion programme.  We owe our Energy graduate Carol Mahoney and the Carbon Trust a great deal for the advice, guidance and support they have given to help us improve performance.”

Since opening our new factory we have once again turned to the Carbon trust for guidance on further Carbon reduction opportunities which include improvements to our energy saving management practices, further improvements in the positioning and the use of the compressors and better leak detection by fitting independent metering on the compressors, installation of more high efficient lighting and the possible replacement of our central heating boiler