The green company

Green has never been so fashionable. It stands for being environmentally friendly, innovative and ready for the future. No wonder, then, that green is the favourite colour of many marketing departments. With the new GreenTech label, ebm-papst is also presenting itself as an all-round green company. Here is a look behind the scenes.

Markus Mettler is Technical Operations Manager at ebm-papst in Mulfingen, Germany. He also serves as the location’s environmental officer. This dual role is extremely logical: “When the environmental officer has a good idea, the operations manager can implement it straight away,” the native of Germany’s Hohenlohe region relates with a smile. Mettler has free rein to implement environmental measures if they also make economic sense. He started right at the company’s own home base. Working together with an innovative heating contractor from the region, the heat distribution system at the location was optimised in terms of its energy consumption. This has provided a savings of some 600 tonnes of CO2 per year. However, Mettler is not yet fully satisfied: “We still have to deal with the heating boilers. The last one was built 27 years ago and we still have lots of capacity, though our heated space has increased almost threefold since then. Years ago, systems were sized quite differently.” This is in sharp contrast to the new green plant right around the corner in Hollenbach. There, the capacities were designed to match the area and type of use exactly — to the last detail. Where do the company’s high environmental standards come from? “We work in a wonderful cultural landscape in which others go on holiday. This environment has an impact on us, and we know that we have a great responsibility to maintain it.”

Thinking, calculating, acting. “First: product design that conserves resources. Second: manufacturing that conserves resources. Third: energyefficient, low-noise operation. This has become our principle for development,” emphasises Dr Bruno Lindl, Managing Director Development. And this is true even if it seems unreasonable at first glance. Such was the case in 1990: “Electricity prices were low and semiconductor prices were high, but we kept focusing on our efficient, electronically controlled motors and fans and continuously developed them. That is now paying off.” Lindl believes that the greatest potential savings lies in a comprehensive view of the complete system at the customer’s facility. Here, the largest increases in efficiency are hidden. “Discovering this potential and realising it together with our customers is our clear competitive advantage.”

Gunter Streng, R&D Manager for Product Division A, illustrates how these ambitious goals are implemented when developing new products, offering the example of the HyBlade® axial fans. The blades are no longer made entirely of aluminium, but rather of an aluminium insert sprayed with fibreglass-reinforced plastic. In a study, the developers had a life cycle assessment carried out of the new fans in the manufacturing phase — from bauxite mining to die-casting to the finished product. The result: “For a production run of 100,000 HyBlade® fans, the savings is 9,000 megawatt-hours. This roughly corresponds to the energy consumption of 3,000 households.” This calculation does not even include the large potential savings provided by EC-powered fans in operation. However, the same holds true for other products of the company’s three German locations, including the condensing boiler technology from Landshut (see “Pioneers in heating technology”).

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