The new installation will help to significantly reduce the company’s natural gas consumption, and therefore CO2 emissions
BENEO, a leading manufacturer of functional ingredients for food, feed and pharma, is continuing its commitment towards more sustainable production processes by installing new equipment at its rice ingredients plant in Wijgmaal, Belgium. Thanks to a large-scale industrial heat pump supplied by Heaten, a specialist in industrial heat pump solutions, the company will be able to recover energy from wastewater to reduce its CO2 emissions.
The rice ingredients produced at BENEO’s Wijgmaal site are used by food manufacturers worldwide to make pudding creamier, improve the dough consistency of a pizza crust or refine the viscosity of soups more conveniently. Manufacturing speciality rice ingredients involves both a wet extraction operation and a drying process, which requires very high temperatures. Currently, the energy for the drying process is derived from natural gas. By investing in an industrial heat pump that recovers energy from wastewater that would have been usually lost, BENEO continues to improve its sustainable energy management. Thanks to state-of-the-art technology used by the heat pump, the energy from the wastewater is increased to a level that is high enough to contribute to the drying process of rice starch or rice protein.
In this way, the new installation will help to significantly reduce the company’s natural gas consumption, and therefore CO2 emissions. BENEO has been collaborating with the company Heaten as an experienced partner in industrial heat pumps to improve the sustainability of its overall production process.
