The systematic improvement in energy utilisation, energy consumption and energy efficiency has helped ensure that the German business sites operated by Schirm GmbH successfully underwent re-certification in line with ISO 50001 in the autumn of 2018 and have now received the DEKRA certificate for another three years. At the same time, it was also possible to transfer and integrate the new Schirm location in Wolfenbüttel into the energy management scheme during the auditing process.

Energy manager Mario Weis says, “By employing technical efficiency measures, we’ve been able to save 3.45 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy during the last three years. This roughly matches the annual energy consumption at our business site in Baar-Ebenhausen. Establishing unified standards for using and consuming energy and complying with the far-reaching norm requirements have enabled us to achieve this – as well as forming energy teams at each local site; they are assessing energy consumption and developing further measures for energy saving projects.”

Sustainability projects related to all the sources of energy (electricity, natural gas, heating oil) have enabled the company to achieve an average increase in energy efficiency of 7%. In addition to adopting process technology measures to reduce energy, the company is now generating compressed air through having installed new speed-regulated compressors with heat recovery facilities, has installed LED lighting and has completed various types of thermal insulation work – to quote some examples.

“We’d already been able to meet the energy goal that we set ourselves – i.e. saving 1.5% of our total energy per business year during the years 2016-2020 – by the beginning of 2018. This provides an additional bonus for the coming projects. Despite this, we can still do a lot to improve matters and can help reduce our energy consumption by introducing more improvements. We can achieve this by working together,” energy manager Weis adds.