Energy saving (Sweden)

Univar Europe has set goals for each site to improve on its already high standards and measurements in the important areas of Environment, Safety, Health and Quality.

Our Gothenburg site in Sweden has reduced its CO2 emissions to atmosphere considerably over the last few years.

Ann-Christin Ericson, SHEQ Manager Nordics comments, “For some years we have worked with an energy-saving project in Gothenburg, both at the terminal and at the office. Below you can see the result of the saving actions:

2007 saw an increase in energy demand due to a 4-fold increase in office space use, otherwise the baseline use remained below 2006 figures.”

By saving nearly 70 tonnes of oil from being burnt the site has also reduced its CO2 emissions by around 240 tonnes!

One of the most effective actions the site team took was to change the warehouse doors to quick opening and closing doors, controlled from the fork lift trucks. This has reduced the amount of oil and electricity being used to heat the warehouse and offices.

Ann-Christin continues, “Another action was to install light sensors in some areas, as we all know still today people forget to turn off the lights!”

Continued saving project
The energy saving project has continued this year with the help of an energy consultant ÅF-Infrastruktur who performed an energy audit. Their proposals are being studied and in principle will be implemented over the next 2-4 years.

Energy declaration
The Univar office building in Gothenburg is more than 5,000 m². Landlords responsible for offices and apartments have to do an energy declaration before the end of 2008 and put the result (a graph) close to the entrance. In this case Univar Gothenburg has already completed their assessment and the graph is posted in the lobby.

Here you can see the energy declaration close to the entrance of the office building in Gothenburg. The dot on the graph shows the energy consumption; a dot in the middle says “very low consumption” and a dot at the border means “very high consumption”. So the result shows that we are better than average!