Britvic, Highland Spring and Tarmac are among the first companies to work with the Carbon Trust in IEEA.
Through IEEA, the trust aims to transform the traditional sector-specific processes that underpin British manufacturing. The organisation will identify and demonstrate new, lower-carbon solutions that could be replicated across each sector.
The programme is expected to reduce energy costs for businesses by more than half a billion pounds and to cut carbon emissions by more than three million tonnes. It will also increase the capacity of these businesses to respond to the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme, which comes into effect in April 2010.
Mark Williamson, director of innovations at Carbon Trust, said: “More than a quarter of the UK’s carbon emissions come from industry and we’ve got to find new opportunities to reduce them. The way to make truly substantial cuts is to get to the very heart of manufacturing.
“By rethinking the way manufacturers operate from the ground up we plan to spearhead a low carbon industrial revolution that will not only reduce emissions but will also increase demand for innovation, generate jobs and cut costs.”
The Carbon Trust is now inviting companies to collaborate in research, development and demonstration that will establish the business case for commercialising lower-carbon manufacturing processes. It is offering GBP250,000 match funding to partners in each sector.
The IEEA is a four year programme, focused on moderately energy intensive industries that are outside the EU ETS but impacted by climate change agreements or the CRC.
The pilot phase of the IEEA found that up to 90% of a site’s energy consumption is used by industry-specific manufacturing processes and that the carbon output of these processes can be reduced by an average of 28%.
The Carbon Trust estimates that implementing these reductions in the manufacture of plastic bottles, animal feed and asphalt would cut energy costs for manufacturers in these sectors by GBP80m and reduce their carbon emissions by nearly half a million tonnes per annum.
