Local industry goes green (11/26/2008)

Don't look now, but Jay County industry is going green.

Company by company, decision after decision is being made that cuts waste going to the landfill, reduces energy consumption, and protects water resources.

Consider:

•In July, FCC (Indiana) put a new roof made of reflective white material over the office areas as part of a plant-wide effort to reduce the company's carbon footprint.

•Motion sensors have been installed in offices at Tri-State Coca-Cola Bottling Company's Portland plant which turn off the lights when there's no activity in the room. Similar sensors were built into the new Holiday Inn Express to reduce energy use.

•Solar panels were installed in October at the Super 8 motel in Portland.

•And in Dunkirk, Saint-Gobain Containers has revised its product delivery process in a way that eliminated 300,000 miles, saving 50,000 gallons of diesel fuel a year and eliminating 305 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Saint-Gobain is the grand-daddy of local industries when it comes to environmental concerns. Glass is a 100 percent recyclable product, and the Dunkirk plant has been using recycled glass - known as cullet - for decades.

Today, longneck beer bottles produced at Dunkirk for Anheuser-Busch contain 40 percent recycled material, and company officials say they are exploring a variety of options for increasing that number.

Every one percent of recycled glass used cuts energy costs by half a percent, according to the Glass Packaging Institute. A 10 percent increase in recycled glass decreases fossil fuel emissions by 2.5 percent and particulate emissions by 7 percent.

At Coca-Cola, much of the emphasis is on water stewardship. The goal, under a Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability initiative by Coca-Cola Enterprises, is to reduce water use in the production of Coke products to a 1 to 1 basis: One liter of water used for every liter of product produced.

"It was above two in the not too distant past," said Bill Marty, community affairs manager for Tri-State Coca-Cola, in a recent interview. "We're now recapturing 90 percent of the water used in the process."

Marty noted that the Portland plant is one of only three in the country using its own wells. Parent company Coca-Cola Enterprises produces 80 percent of the Coke products in America.

"We do have a project teed up for 2009 for changing the way we do water treatment," said maintenance engineer Steve Hreha. That project would install a nano filtration system that would filter water used to backwash tanks and lines so that it would be as clean as rainwater.

Working with the city, county, and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, Coke officials hope the new system would allow the company to simply discharge the filtered water into the aquifer rather than sending it through Portland's wastewater treatment system.

Reduction of electrical consumption has been a goal for both Coke and FCC.

"We've gotten rid of our halogen bulbs," said Hreha. The plant reduces use of electrical lights on sunny days, thanks to skylights in the production area.

Plant manager Ronald Stockton said lighting amounted to about 40 percent of the plant's electric bill. By focusing on ways to light more efficiently, Coke was able to add a new production line last year without adding costs. "The electric bill went down," Stockton said.

FCC gradually replaced light bulbs from halide to T8 fluorescent lighting, saving 546,466 kilowatt hours.

"Just by changing the bulbs, we have saved electricity, improved the quality of morale in the place, and improved our productivity," said Stacie Southworth, assistant human resources manager.

At Saint-Gobain, the production process itself has been targeted for energy reduction.

Glass is melted at the Dunkirk plant's furnaces by combusting natural gas with oxygen and using electric boosting. The combination of the oxygen firing and the electrical boosting technologies has allowed the plant to reduce its nitrogen oxide emissions compared to traditional glass melting equipment.

That's important because nitrogen oxide is a contributor to acid rain and air pollution. Saint-Gobain officials said the company is the leader in the U.S. in the use of oxygen firing glass container furnaces.

The company is also testing waste heat recovery systems which could in the future spell significant reductions in energy consumption.

For FCC, recycling has been a major focus over the past year. The company recycles paper, plastic, aluminum, carbide inserts, wood, gloves, absorbents, mop heads, fluorescent bulbs, batteries, ballasts, computer monitors, electrical components, water, and steel.

While the average person sends about 55 percent of his waste to a landfill, FCC now sends only 2 percent.

"We are working on projects to improve this corporation, and one of them is how we can lower that 2 percent," said human resources manager Eric Garringer. The environmental effort has come as part of FCC's compliance with the plants ISO 14001 certification.

The FCC recycling program is so extensive that the company estimates the mass of recycled matter from the plant each year would weigh as much as 497 Honda Civics.

Sometimes a single decision can result in huge savings.

"One of the initiatives here was to replace our paper towels with electric hand dryers," said Coke's Hreha. Because the bottling plant is a food plant, cleanliness is a big issue and paper towel use was enormous.

Thanks to the electric hand dryers the plant went from two dumpsters of trash a week to one per month.

All waste aluminum from canning operations is recycled.

"Not only is it neat from being a good steward of raw materials," said Stockton, "but we also avoid a lot of costs by not going to the landfill."

In fact, he noted a well-managed environmental effort is simply good business.

"You save a lot of money, and it's a conservation effort," said Stockton.[[In-content Ad]]