Product recovery

Product recovery is the amount of product that can be “saved” and used instead of being discarded as waste.

In every plant, some product never makes it into packaging. It remains in pipes, tanks, pumps and machines, is generated during product changeovers, or fails to meet requirements during line start-up. If nothing is done with it, it ends up in the wastewater or as waste, and with it go the raw materials, labour, energy and money that went into making it.

Product recovery covers all the measures that allow this product to be used, such as:

• emptying product residue from pipes and tanks into packaging instead of flushing it out,
• collecting product from equipment before cleaning,
• reusing product in production where quality requirements allow, for example by adding it to the next batch of the same product.

Recovery is usually measured as the amount of product that has been used, or as the percentage of product that would have been lost without these measures. The more expensive the product, the more valuable each recovered litre or kilogram becomes.

Example: A cosmetics plant produces an expensive cream in several batches a day. Every time the batch changes, some cream remains in the pipes. Over a year, this adds up to a large amount of finished product that, without pigging, would go down the drain. With pigging, the pig pushes the cream out of the pipes into the filling machine, so it ends up in jars and on store shelves.