Plant Utilities Optimization through Environmental Management System in ISO14000 Environment

The present work addresses the issue of defining a methodology able to select the best intervention(s) allowing reduction air pollution for an Environmental Management System (EMS) according to ISO14000 regulation. The objective is to realise an EMS with the concurrent tasks of minimizing environmental impacts and maximizing the global performance in terms of energy saving, maintenance activities, and global management costs. This is done by defining three main parameters - time of the intervention, its complexity and economic expenses able to highlight the capability that a corrective measure can have to reduce the air pollution. The approach has been validated by analysing the plant utilities (electricity, compressed air, air conditioning, transports) of a firm producing smart cards. In the application case a cogeneration system and a solar cell system have been compared through our approach, obtaining a solution able to reduce the environmental impact and concurrently maximising energy saving.