Plant utilities optimisation through environmental management system in ISO14001

The present work addresses the issue of defining a methodology able to select the best intervention(s) to reduce air pollution during the construction of an Environmental Management System (EMS) according to ISO14000 regulation. The objective is to achieve an EMS with the concurrent tasks of minimizing environmental impacts and maximizing overall performance in terms of energy saving, maintenance activities, and global management costs through the definition of three main parameters - time of the intervention, its complexity and economic convenience able to highlight the capability that a corrective measure can have to reduce the air pollution. The approach has been validated analysing the plant utilities (electricity, compressed air, air conditioning, transports) of a firm producing smart cards. Within the application case a cogeneration system and a solar cell system have been compared through the methodology developed. As a result, we have obtained a solution able to reduce the environmental impact maximising energy saving.