Energy - Case study

Layer Treatment Works

Employees at Layer de la Haye treatment works realised that too many lights were left on overnight so they came up with a few ideas to reduce energy wastage and help the environment.

Gary Banks, the treatment works manager said: “The problem with a large works is that it’s difficult to have one person responsible for making sure all lights are off at the end of the day.  We had to make it everyone’s responsibility, a real team effort, to change current behaviour.  For this to happen everyone had to have the same level of knowledge.  It had to be easy to identify the location of light switches as well as which ones had to be left on for health and safety reasons.”

An audit of all lighting in the works was carried out to find out how many lights could be switched off.  The survey also noted that some strip lights could be replaced with new tubes that emitted the same level of light, but used less electricity, making even more savings. 

A system was created so that light switches could easier to identify.  Martin Measor explained “To make identification simple we produced coloured surrounds for each switch.  We used a colour coded system with green for switch off and red for leave on.  This makes it easy to identify the location of switches and everyone instantly knows which lights can be switched off without causing problems to the works.”

These small measures have resulted in CO2 to the equivalent of a hatchback car being driven eight and a half times around the M25 motorway being saved at the treatment works each night.