The ‘Handprints’ concept is a relatively new area in Coor’s sustainability work, and the aim is to clarify Coor’s positive environmental impact to our customers. While a customer’s footprint measures the negative environmental impact, the Handprint tool focuses on the positive impact and is focused on actions and solutions.
Coor’s goal is to actively contribute to minimizing our customers’ environmental impact. Positive Handprints represent the activities we carry out that help our customers achieve their sustainability goals. This might relate to providing services and solutions that minimize energy consumption, or reduce food waste in our restaurants.
One example is provided by Coor’s energy experts, which help many of our customers reduce their energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. During the year, Coor helped SAAB to replace three oil-fueled boilers with heat pumps, installed heat recovery in painting operations, improved lighting control, installed heat recovery for compressors and improved ventilation control in painting operations. In total, this generated energy savings of more than 1.8 GWh/year, of which direct fossil fuels decreased by 315 MWh/year.
Space management is another of Coor’s Handprint areas. Continuously helping our customers to optimize space management reduces the need for new construction, while also increasing the life span of existing buildings. It also reduces energy consumption.
In Denmark, Coor helped several customers to install Energy Management Systems, including Novozymes, Velux, GN StoreNord, the Danish Police and Fisketorvet. At Velux, Coor uses solar-powered robots to mow the lawns, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
In the Mälardalen area, Coor Sweden completed several projects focused on reducing energy consumption. Modernization and programming of control functions has enabled energy savings on many sites, including adjusting refrigerants in tech rooms to reduce cooling consumption, and renovating evaporative cooling systems to reduce the need to buy in energy.
Operational efficiency managers and energy controllers are two professional roles that are becoming increasingly important to Coor. The former work to optimize and implement energy savings in our delivery, while the latter work to illustrate the savings generated on behalf of our customers and to prioritize the operational efficiency manager’s focus areas.
“From 2021 onwards, we’ll be presenting the total energy savings generated by Coor as part of our Handprint concept. Continuous improvements are in Coor’s DNA, and this applies especially to sustainability. Our employees’ capacity for innovation contributes to numerous great solutions for our customers and it feels natural to collate these in the Handprint concept in order to reveal the positive contribution we make,” commented Maria Ekman, Head of Group Sustainability.
SmartEnergy is a new system for measuring energy use at a production plant, in order to optimise the use of energy.
Energy efficiency achieved through SmartEnergy leads to cost savings as well as a reduction of greenhouse gases. SmartEnergy can also increase the lifespan of equipment such as lighting, which needs replacing less frequently because it is used less.
At Saab’s site in Huskvarna, Coor has used SmartEnergy to help Saab reduce its annual energy use by 9.3 per cent, which at the Huskvarna plant equates to 452 MWh. This has cut costs by around SEK 350,000 annually. SmartEnergy also contributed to a major reduction in CO2 at the plant.
The plan is now to apply SmartEnergy at several of Saab’s production plants, in order to achieve further cost and energy savings.