Austrian steel foundry is going green

MFL is planning to reduce its carbon footprint by a third – the equivalent of 1,000 households

MFL is a foundry, located near the Austrian town of Liezen, that also does machine engineering. It has a plan to significantly reduce its emissions by the year 2030 in line with Austrian and EU goals for the period.

Is green industry just a myth? Not in Austria!

MFL is part of the Green Tech Cluster, an initiative set up by a bunch of companies (80 to be exact) back in 2005 with the aim to drive circular economy solutions and become a global hotspot of industrial climate protection.

That means that MFL were already far along the road to becoming a sustainable business. Their facilities have been renovated to be thermally efficient, and also equipped with LED and insulated windows.

Around 90% of the raw material the foundry uses to produce its cast metal parts is scrap collected from across Austria.

One of the new systems to be implemented will feed excess heat into the biomass network of the district heating power plant in Liezen.

All in all, the company wants to reduce its total energy consumption by a third until the year 2030. This will mean saving up to 8.5 million euros, or the rough equivalent of the energy requirement of 1,000 homes in the Austrian region of Styria.

It is not enough to buy Carbon Allowances

The Green Tech Cluster helps companies to draw up a climate balance and to formulate savings targets, presenting sustainability as a matter of a company’s bottom line.

The Austrian Broadcasting Company, ORF reported that the Managing Director of The Green Tech Cluster Bernhard Puttinger saw a strong movement in the direction of climate protection in the companies, saying:

“To stick with concrete examples: The Gratzer brewery has been working climate-neutrally for years. But also the big industrial companies like Infineon or AT&S have clear goals to be climate neutral by 2030."

Despite promising data, Puttinger stressed the fact that companies need to achieve real CO2 savings because becoming climate-neutral in the next then years would be impossible by purchasing Carbon Allowances.

Puttinger continued: “We can see that half of the companies have already calculated a greenhouse gas balance, a climate balance, and a third have a clear reduction schedule. Styria is internationally ahead - on par with Scandinavia."