How coffee-making can help one understand cleaner production

Cleaner production works. This has been proved by numerous case studies over the last few years in Austria^1–4, as well as in the USA, Sweden, the UK and The Netherlands. Programs such as PREPARE in Austria, the US-American EPAs program, the Landskrona Project in Sweden, the Aire and Calder Project in the UK and PRISMA in The Netherlands have demonstrated that in all sectors of industry it is possible to increase efficiency in the use of materials and energy in industrial processes and at the same time avoid waste and emissions at their source and save companies—sometimes enormous amounts of—money.The cities of Graz and Stenum have developed the program Ökoprofit (Ecoprofit)³, which aims to provide a cost-effective way of involving regional enterprises in a Cleaner Production Project. The approach consists basically of two arms: (1) nine 1-day workshops to give feedback on the progress of the companies, to teach basics of emission prevention, project management and law; (2) consultations with individual companies to help them with specific problems, between the workshops.The teaching sessions during the workshops consist of a short lecture followed by active work in small groups on examples, presentation of the results, a discussion of the findings and the possibilities of applying them to the actual companies of the participants. In one workshop, participants analyse the coffee-making process for its potential to minimize emissions; in another, they analyse it for its energy-saving potential. This article describes how these two interactive training modules for mass-flow analysis and energy analysis are conducted.