Miller Magazine Issue: 117 September 2019

68 COVER STORY MILLER / SEPTEMBER 2019 Sustainable solutions already today At the Networking Days, Bühler is present- ing solutions that contribute to its sustaina- bility targets even today: Revolutionary Mill E3 and digital Yield Management System: With Mill E3, Bühler is yet again redefining industrial grain milling. Thanks to a completely new mill design, new technologies, and systematic digitalization, mills of the future will take up 30 percent less space, use 10 percent less energy, and boost yields by several percentage points, depending on the specific application. Energy-efficient wafer baking oven SWAKT-ECO: A novel heating concept slashes gas consumption by as much as 25 percent and emissions by up to 90 percent. Safe foods with Laatu, the completely new tech- nology for microbial re- duction: Safe low energy electrons destroy 99.999 percent of all salmonellae in dry products such as spices. In comparison to steam treatment, Laatu cuts ener- gy usage by as much as 80 per- cent, while water requirement and the application of chemicals is re- duced to zero. Digital die-casting cell: Bühler has de- veloped the digital die-casting cell for man- ufacturing aluminum and magnesium com- ponents. The vision is to produce castings with a reject rate of 0 percent, a 40 percent shorter cycle time, and 24/7 uptime. The new die-casting machine Fusion is part of the digital cell. It lowers energy consumption by as much as 40 percent. QuaLiB: Bühler has developed a quality verification process for mixing the electrode slurries used in lithium-ion batteries that applies data-based algorithms in order to ensure that only the very best slurry quality will make it to the next production stage. QuaLiB is capable of preventing over 1000 kilograms of waste per week (based on an output of 1000 kilograms per hour). Industrial-scale insect processing: For just under ten years now, work has been proceeding on the industrial pro- cessing of insects for protein production. In June 2019, Bühler and the Dutch pro- ducer Protix opened the world’s first and at the same time larg- est insect protein plant. The larvae of the black soldier fly transform low-grade food res- idues quickly and sustainably into body mass, thereby returning the waste to the food cycle. They need only very little space for growth, which gives them a very much smaller carbon footprint than other sources of protein. The protein of the lar- vae is processed into sustain- able feeds. This reduces the pressure on other feed sources such as soya or fish- meal. Meat alternatives: Bühler has developed a special extrusion technology allowing meat food substitutes to be produced which have delicious taste, for instance from envi- ronmentally beneficial protein sources such as legumes.