- Tell us about Arçelik. What is your core business and role within the project?
Arçelik is founded on 1955 and specializes in consumer durables and consumer electronics, offering production, marketing, and after-sales support services in these sectors. With more than 30,000 employees throughout the world, 12 brands (Arçelik, Beko, Grundig, Blomberg, elektrabregenz, Arctic, Leisure, Flavel, Defy, Altus, Dawlance, and Voltas Beko), sales and marketing offices in 43 countries, and 22 production facilities in 8 countries – including two facilities in Romania, Arçelik offers products and services in nearly 150 countries.
Being the 2nd largest white goods company of Europe according to market share ranking based on quantity, Arçelik is also the market leader in Romania with Arctic, in South Africa with Defy, and in Pakistan with Dawlance brands. We have involved in ECOFACT project with our Arctic Washing Machine plant in Ulmi, Romania as a demo site to the proof of concept of the developed technologies in industry.
- Why did your organisation get involved in the ECOFACT project? How does this activity fit with the normal business of your organisation?
Sustainability is at the core of Arçelik’s business model and its efforts in this area are recognized and awarded by various global institutions. Arçelik has been recognized as the Industry Leader in 2019 and 2020 by the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. In 2021, Arçelik ranked 13th among 150 companies by the Real Leaders Top 150 Impact Companies of 2021, according to its sustainable and eco-conscious business efforts. Also, Arçelik was ranked #34 in the Corporate Knights’ Global 100 Most Sustainable Companies list, and also recognized as the world’s most sustainable home appliances and houseware company. We have also earned a place on the 2021 Clean200 List, published in partnership with U.S. non-profit, As You Sow.
At Arçelik, we set ambitious targets for 2030 that guide us through our fight against the climate crisis. These targets include reducing the energy consumption per product by 45%, reaching the 15 MW installed capacity of renewables etc. We have made a commitment to Science Based Targets initiative to decrease our absolute Scope-1 and 2 GHG emissions by 30% and Scope-3 GHG emissions from the use of our sold products by 15% by 2030 from a 2018 base year. We put our efforts to decrease our ecological footprint both in production and our products. ECOFACT offers to increase our sustainability features in production by increasing resource and energy efficiency with the help of increased digitalization and analytics of the collected data.
- How will the outputs of the ECOFACT project help production system energy performance?
Increasing the digitalization level of our factory will enable us to collect more data via installed analysers and sensors which will enable us to have deeper analysis. Having digital twins of our processes and auxiliary facilities enable us to have parametric analysis to increase efficiency. Thanks to optimisation studies driven by ML algorithms, will give feedbacks to our system for potential energy saving points..
- What are the technical challenges your work in ECOFACT is trying to overcome?
As an industrial demo site partner, we will be one of the proof of concept of the ECOFACT project, in the other words we will be one of the end-users of the project. After the project, we have more insights about the processes and auxiliary facilities by increased collected data.
- What positive impacts will the projects have when complete?
Based on the insights we will receive from the ECOFACT platform, we will explore opportunities on increasing our resource efficiency and energy saving. We have also included one of our suppliers in Romania, to have a dynamic Life-Cycle Analysis of washing machine production and explore the opportunities for our supply chain. Therefore, we will not only decrease our energy consumption and cost of resources, but also the environmental footprint of our manufacturing.
