Finishing - September-October 2023

12 ENERGY
Are you ready for the green effect?
With energy prices skyrocketing all over
Europe the question of lowering your
energy consumption has never been
more urgent. But there might be an easy
solution with an enormous hidden potential –
cutting costs and increasing profit while at the
same time making the coating industry
greener.
The coating industry is very energy
demanding. This is a fact that has been
known to us for long, but we never knew
exactly how much energy that escapes during
the process. Now we know.
We are meeting up with Petter Törefors,
CEO and owner of HangOn AB, a Swedish
developer and manufacturer of solutions for
hanging, masking, and handling, solutions that
today are distributed to more than 40
countries around the world. For starters the
business idea was mostly about helping
customers to increase efficiency and
profitability in their coating process, a mission
in which they have succeeded. But the
question that has been eating away during the
last couple of years, ever since HangOn
conducted a life cycle analysis (LCA) on their
own products 20 years ago, is the question of
sustainability. All while visiting customers and
exploring their needs for further development.
– And it is obvious that finding the right
solutions for sustainability in the coating
industry by increasing hanging density is the
most important thing we can do for our
customers, Törefors says.
Sustainability – a top priority
In the coating industry for the last decades,
sustainability has been a top priority when it
comes to limit emissions, preventing air and
water pollution and putting effort to
reformulate and produce environment-friendly
coatings. Furthermore, the coating industry
has gone long ways to explore the
development of bio-renewable technologies to
reduce the carbon footprint. An array of
certified environmentally preferable paints and
coatings are available, which all together have
much lower levels of toxicity, while also
having recyclable content. Some of these
paints are not only environmentally friendly,
but also more cost-effective than conventional
paints.
Energy consumption in the
coating line
But consumer awareness keeps putting
pressure on reaching further. Today,
specifically OEM companies in general and
the automotive industry in particular need to
be looking to impact the entire value chain in
terms of sustainability aspects. One essential
question to be investigated has been to
establish numbers on the energy consumption
and the energy losses in a coating line.
– We decided to find the answer, Törefors
explains.
The idea that Petter Törefors and the team
at HangOn started out with was to
understand in depth what the energy
consumption in a coating line really looks like.
To achieve this, they conducted a thorough
study in five different standard powder coating
line set-ups, assisted by surface treatment
expert Anders Jansson, Meyer & Hjort AB.
What the study rather surprisingly revealed,
was that regardless of how much goods you
fill the line with the energy consumption is
constant up to between 80 and 90 percent.
For example, increasing the goods flow times
five per hour with HQC-hanging instead of
regular hooks, will only increase the total
energy consumption with 18 percent, Törefors
says.
Finishing - September/October 2023
continues on page 14