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Abstract: The pulp and paper industry is one of the most energy-intensive industries worldwide. In 2007, it accounted for 5% of total global industrial energy consumption and 2% of direct industrial carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. An energy audit is a primary step toward improving energy efficiency at the facility level. This paper describes a plant-wide energy audit aimed at identifying energy conservation and CO2 mitigation opportunities at a paper mill in Guangdong province, China. We describe the energy audit methods, relevant Chinese standards, methods of calculating energy and carbon indicators, baseline energy consumption and CO2 emissions of the audited paper mill, and nine energy-efficiency improvement opportunities identified by the audit. For each of the nine options, we evaluate the energy conservation and associated CO2 mitigation potential. The total technical energy conservation potential for these nine opportunities is 967.8terajoules (TJ), and the total CO2 mitigation potential is equal to 93,453tonnes CO2 annually, representing 14.4% and 14.7%, respectively, of the mill’s total energy consumption and CO2 emissions during the audit period. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The first objective of this paper is to map the adoption of technologies for the reduction of energy and resource consumption in production and the second is to test the relationship between the implementation of those technologies and the performance of manufacturing firms. The aim is to contribute to the identification of the characteristics of the manufacturing firms that use this kind of innovative technology in order to help policy makers promote energy and resource efficiency in a suitable manner. Our research is based on the Spanish and Slovenian subsamples of a wider European Manufacturing Survey. Our suggested models explain how significant energy efficiency is, and how much of the variability in economic performance and environmental performance it can explain. The results show that the use of energy and material saving technologies does not have a clear and significant relationship with economic performance. On the other hand a significant positive relationship is found between energy and material saving technologies and environmental performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]