Save around 72,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalents when smoking
Paradigm shift in Germany: a few weeks ago, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the current climate protection law is unconstitutional and must be improved. According to the constitutional judges, there was a lack of sufficient requirements for emission reductions from 2031. However, all options for reducing greenhouse gases must be exhausted earlier if the minimum target of a temperature increase in the atmosphere of well below two degrees Celsius is to be achieved. The food industry must also contribute to this. The proven CleanSmoke smoking process is one tool that can be used to achieve this goal.
“CleanSmoke is currently the best smoking process for climate-friendly food production,” says Uwe Vogel, chairman of the Cleansmoke Coalition. Compared to CleanSmoke, traditional friction and smoulder smoking methods perform significantly worse. This has been clearly demonstrated by a life cycle assessment conducted by the German Institute of Food Technologies (DIL). When smoking with CleanSmoke, a stable smoke is freshly generated for the smoking chamber from primary smoke condensate using compressed air. This means that food can be smoked with a low pollutant load and in a way that protects the climate and resources – in other words, sustainably.
Climate protection is a top issue for Germans
A study by the Federal Environment Agency has shown how important the topic of environmental and climate protection is to Germans – and therefore also to customers. 65 percent of Germans consider it a very important issue – despite Corona. Climate protection in particular remained just as important for 70 percent during the pandemic and had even become more important for 16 percent.
The European Union (EU) has also been demanding for years that the manufacturing industry only uses processing technologies that offer the best possible protection for the environment. Based on the German market for smoked products, CleanSmoke technology can save around 50 percent of energy and – based on the current energy mix – around 30 percent of climate gas emissions. This is one of the reasons why the EU has designated the CleanSmoke process as “Best Available Technology” (BAT). However, CleanSmoke is currently used by just one in ten smoked foods, which allows a reduction of 7.2 percent in energy consumption and eight percent in climate gases.
Saving 600 million kilowatt hours of energy per year
The enormous savings potential of the innovative smoking process is made clear by just a few figures: in Germany alone, around 600 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy could be saved. If all smoked products in Germany were smoked with CleanSmoke, energy consumption would be around one billion kWh. The smoking process would account for 97.6 percent and raw material production for 2.4 percent. That adds up to about 228,000 metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions, 2.5 percent of which would be for raw material production.
Conventional smoking, by comparison, would consume about 1.6 billion kWh of energy, 18.2 percent of which would be used to provide the raw materials. And there would be 300,000 metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions, nearly 90 percent of which would be from smoking. What benefit would CleanSmoke thus have for the climate? The atmosphere would be spared around 72,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalents per year. That is as much as is produced in the manufacture of around 14,000 cars. So, by switching to CleanSmoke, smokehouses could already show that they take climate protection and the wishes of their customers seriously.