Coffee chaff-powered heating system saves Strauss about EUR 83,000 per year

(Strauss plant)

This year eKapija web portal again presents the Aurea Award for the best investment in 2012 in late March. While waiting to see who the new winners will be, we have paid a visit to the companies whose projects were shortlisted for last year`s awards to check how far they have gone with the development of their businesses.

Strauss Adriatic was the first company in Serbia and the region to use coffee chaff as biomass fuel to heat complete production and administrative facilities of its plant in Simanovci, doing that as of 1 November 2011. What makes this project unique is the use of coffee chaff as a fuel in a biomass boiler room. The technology itself is not a novelty, but coffee chaff has never before been utilized in this way and it’s always been treated as a waste, so that its capability to generate heat and this application represent a genuine curiosity. The plant in Simanovci annually produces 140 tonnes of coffee chaff briquettes, which is enough for 3 months of heating. The boiler room is designed to burn other kinds of biomass as well, so that the rest of the heating fuel can always be chosen in accordance with the market trends.

For this project Strauss won the Aurea Best Innovation Award, and we were wondering how the use of coffee chaff affected their business.

- Stating the fact that the investment totaling EUR 120,000 paid off by the end of 2012, that is, in less than a year and a half, is an excellent way to illustrate how the coffee chaff-powered heating system has affected the operations of Strauss Adriatic.

On the other hand, considering our company`s strong orientation towards socially responsible operations in a broader sense, we believe that the most important result of this form of heating is the reduced emission of carbon-dioxide, that is, gases causing greenhouse effects. Concretely, the total annual emission of these gases from the factory in Simanovci into the atmosphere has been decreased by about 11 percent from the previous year because the products of the biomass burning process are fully enviromentally acceptable and have no adverse effect on the environment - people at Strauss told our web portal.

Money and gas savings

When it comes to savings, Strauss benefits the most from quitting using liquefied natural gas (propane butane) as a heating fuel.

- Savings are calculated through the comparison of LNG consumption in the previous year with the consumption in the winter 2011/2012. We came to a conclusion at the end of the previous heating season that the savings made in the period November 2011-April 2012 stood at about EUR 83,000. This winter we expect savings to be on a similar level as in the previous heating season – our interlocutors explained.

The Strauss Group has made a five-year plan (2012-2016) setting some environmental goals and focusing on the most important effects on the environment, such as energy consumption reduction by 10 percent, greenhouse gas emission reduction by 15 percent, and a 15 percent increase in the amount of recycled and reused waste. In line with the group's objectives, Strauss Adriatia now works to improve production processes to make them completely harmless to the environment.

Nemanja Masic (Photo: Aurea 2012)

Aside from reducing harmful effects on the environment, Strauss Adriatic is constantly searching for ways to improve the entire business. One of the results is the coffee chaff-powered heating project, the idea for which came from their engineer Nemanja Masic.

Although savings are evident, no other company has so far expressed interest in this project.

People at Strauss explained that that fuel was specific and available exclusively to large companies engaged in coffee processing.

However, as they added, due to exceptional results achieved in Serbia, this project can also be applied in other countries where the Strauss Group operates, and the fact that this form of heating originates in our country represents a great satisfaction.