Greener standards for chilled water systems soon

This article is more than 12 months old

Nov 26, 2019 06:00 am

The National Environment Agency (NEA) will set minimum energy-efficiency standards for chilled water systems in industrial facilities from next year, which will cut about 100,000 tonnes of carbon emissions annually.

Minister for the Environment and Water Resources Masagos Zulkifli yesterday notedabout 70 per cent of such systems here are not optimised. He said Singapore's industrial energy-efficiency standard needs to be improved to be on a par with leading countries.

The initiative will introduce baseline standards to help companies reduce their energy consumption by about 245 gigawatt hours.

The amount of carbon emissions reduced will be the equivalent of taking more than 21,000 cars off the road, and will also save the companies about $37 million in energy costs a year by 2025, said Mr Masagos, who was speaking at a lunch event to mark the conclusion of the Year Towards Zero Waste.

He highlighted some initiatives Singapore took. For instance, NEA and F&N Foods, supported by FairPrice, last month launched a programme to place 50 smart reverse vending machines (RVMs). After the introduction of the first 10 RVMs, around 1,000 plastic bottles and aluminium cans were collected from each RVM daily, said Mr Masagos, an "overwhelmingly positive" response. - TIMOTHY GOH