Leaning towards clever cleaning  

• Employing CIP cuts caustic soda use by some 90 %, and energy and water use by 50 % each
• It also decreases cleaning downtime, boosts productivity and generates cleaner waste or re-usable byproducts

Cleaning-in-place (CIP) is a green process that re-uses caustic soda which has cost and environmental benefits. The sludge from Green CIP is sufficiently clean to be spread on farm land as a fertiliser or even fed to animals. Crucially, the effluent from the caustic soda flush does not need to be ‘cleaned up’ in an expensive waste-water treatment plant before being discharged into municipal drains.

Green CIP has been successfully installed in Actalis, a dairy producer with a 30 000 tonne a year plant in Buffalo, USA that makes mozzarella and ricotta cheese, and in Danone's Yoplait yoghurt plant on the French island of Réunion.

Key benefits

Using this environmentally-friendly cleaning operation helps to:

• Reduce caustic soda use by up to 90 % because the same detergent can be re-used multiple times
• Save water (50 %) by replacing it with a hot alkali for initial pipe flushing
• Cut energy consumption by up to 50 % as waste-water treatment is no longer required, and lines are no longer cooled by an initial cold-water flush, so they don't need to be heated up again when production resumes after cleaning (this also saves time)
• Less downtime (5-20 %) due to a faster cleaning processes under CIP, which boosts productivity and revenue