At the end of last year, the European Parliament finally picked up speed on environmental protection. Barely two weeks after MEPs had declared a climate emergency, the so-called Green New Deal was presented. This Green Deal is a comprehensive programme of action to improve living conditions in Europe on a sustainable basis. The main focus is on climate protection. By 2050 Europe wants to become the first climate-neutral continent. In addition, the deal is also intended to “become Europe’s new growth strategy by investing in green technologies, sustainable solutions and new opportunities for companies”. The CleanSmoke smoking process can help to achieve these goals.
When smoking with CleanSmoke, a stable smoke for the smoking chamber is freshly produced from primary smoke condensate using compressed air. This enables food to be smoked with low contamination levels and in a way that protects the climate and resources – in other words, sustainably. The CleanSmoke Coalition (CSC), a joint initiative of primary smoke product manufacturers, food producers and retailers, has set itself the goal of informing consumers and the interested public about the potential of this groundbreaking technology.
CleanSmoke has a much better eco-balance
However, the plans of the Green New Deal are not new for food production: for a few years, the EU has been demanding that the manufacturing industry only use processing technologies that offer the best possible protection for the environment. This is not the case with conventional smoking. Friction smoking and smouldering smoking perform significantly worse than CleanSmoke, as the life cycle assessment of the Deutsches Institut für Lebensmitteltechnik (DIL) shows.
With CleanSmoke technology, it is possible to save around 50 percent energy and – based on the current energy mix – around 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in relation to the German market for smoked products. However, CleanSmoke is currently used for just one in ten smoked foods, which means that energy consumption can be reduced by 7.2 percent and greenhouse gas emissions by eight percent. In Germany alone, the potential savings amount to around 600 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy. About nine million people could use it to cook their food in microwave ovens.
Save 72,000 tons of CO2 equivalents per year
If all smoked products in Germany were smoked with CleanSmoke, the energy consumption would be about one billion kWh. Of this, 97.6 percent would be accounted for by the smoking process and 2.4 percent by raw material production. This amounts to around 228,000 tons of CO2 equivalents in emissions, 2.5 percent of which is for raw material production. Conventional smoking would have a much higher energy input and climate impact. Approximately 1.6 billion kWh of energy would be consumed in this process, 18.2 percent of which would be used to provide the raw materials. And 300,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalents of emissions would be produced, almost 90 per cent of which would be generated by smoking. What advantage would CleanSmoke have for the climate? The atmosphere would be spared around 72,000 tons of CO2 equivalents per year. That is as much as is produced in the production of about 14,000 cars. Or if 100 people flew around the world 72 times in a plane.
With CleanSmoke, however, much more could be achieved: Every year, the water consumption for smoking could be reduced by about 90 percent and about 2,600 tons of cleaning agents could be saved. In addition, no emissions such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO) would be released and around 3,400 tons less wood would be used. And this in Germany alone. Putting your money on CleanSmoke is therefore a real Green New Deal.
Find more information about CleanSmoke here.