At Circlefied, they specialize in reusing plastic business waste. With the help of the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) and EENergy project, owner Ezra Koldenhof made his sustainable company even more sustainable. Thanks to a financial contribution, they were able to make their industrial heat press 25% more energy efficient. 

Circlefied is a design and production studio specializing in sheet materials. The company makes the sheets from its own waste products. It grinds the waste products and melts them back together into items such as street furniture and trade show stands. What makes Circlefied special? The original waste material remains visible in the sheets. “We once had a project for KLM, where we used old cable ties,” Ezra explains. “In the sheets, you could still see the KLM logo and the airplane numbers.”

Searching for savings
Ezra says that with the help of EEN and EENergy he has made his sustainable company even more sustainable: “To press the panels, we use a veneer press from 1979. We suspected that we could make the press more energy-efficient, as it consumes quite a lot of electricity.” Every inch of the machine was examined. “We used a thermal camera to see where the machine was losing a lot of heat. We connected a control cabinet to measure the power supply. This way, we saw the actual machine consumption during warm-up and when it was at operating temperature. With all that information, we insulated the areas with the most heat loss.” This resulted in a 25% saving. That’s much more than the 5% that EENergy required.