Balancing Sustainability with Profits
Manufacturers are under consistent pressure to improve Operational Efficiency, while meeting ever-changing regulatory guidelines. It’s a moving target, and somewhat daunting when contemplating climate change legislation that affects our operations and continues to evolve. Many see the issue as a trade-off between profits and sustainability. However, manufacturers have a compelling opportunity to meet both objectives through the reduction of wasted materials and energy usage.
Perspective on the Environmental Industry
In the United States, there are over 100,000 environmental professionals working hard every day to comply with Federal, State, and local environmental regulations and permits. Despite their best efforts, a substantial amount of land, air, and water pollution is generated. According to the Federal Register, there are approximately 160,000 sites generating 11.8 billion pounds of hazardous waste annually. Additionally, it is costing manufactures hundreds of billions of dollars each year to generate this waste!
To put this amount of hazardous waste generation into perspective, during an average lifetime this is equivalent to dumping a teaspoon of toxic hazardous waste on every single square foot of the United States, including Alaska. This doesn’t even include the substantial amounts of non-hazardous wastes, air emissions and water pollution.
The EPA encourages source reduction as the most environmentally preferred pollution reduction strategy in their EPA Waste Management Hierarchy. Source reduction differs from all the other categories because the waste is not created in the first place. The other categories deal with managing a waste after it is generated. At present, it appears the manufacturing sector is focused more on recycling than on source reduction. When we reviewed a sample of 175 sustainability scorecards, less than 7% reported any source reduction activities.
Process Efficiency Examples
Waste generation is expensive and more can be done to assist manufacturers with source reduction. Optimizing the efficiency of a piping system can often reduce both raw material usage and waste disposal costs; and the implementation can have a very rapid ROI, when waste costs are properly calculated. One company saved over $232,000 and reduced hazardous waste by 59,170 pounds per year. This is just one example of an efficiency improvement on a piping system, manufacturing facilities typically have hundreds of systems that can be improved!
We were honored to have our engineering services highlighted in the autobiography, Barefoot to Billionaire, by Jon Huntsman, Sr., Founder and Former Executive Chairman Huntsman Corporation (Huntsman, 2014, p. 241). Mr. Huntsman said, “It changed the equation for us” in the reduction of emissions from that of working to meet governmental regulations, to cutting emissions to increase profitability and sustainability. He also said our “suggestions were creative and most entailed only slight changes to manufacturing.” PROCOR Technologies “came up with several proposals, including this one: at one propylene oxide plant, we annually generated 42 million pounds of spent catalyst, a chemical that triggers the reaction to create the end product. That works out to three railroad tank cars a day. The spent catalyst is a hazardous waste and disposing of it was costing us $3.5 million a year. They discovered a way to recover about 30 percent of the spent catalyst, a $3 million annual savings. They also developed other breakthroughs. One permitted recovery of 20,000 pounds of butadiene that we burned in the boilers. Another reduced benzene emissions from our wastewater treatment plant. Yet another decreased chlorine emissions from our wastewater treatment plant. These suggestions were creative and most entailed only slight changes to manufacturing,” (Huntsman, 2014, p. 241). The Huntsman example highlights the opportunities that exist for process efficiency improvement.
Resources to Assist Manufacturers
PROCOR Technologies, Inc., has been in business for over 30 years, with experience in over 100 different industries. We started the Process Efficiency Network to bring that level of technical engineering expertise to manufacturing facilities worldwide, providing advanced technical tools they can use to identify process efficiency improvement opportunities within their own facilities. The Process Efficiency Network has software tools for Process Optimization, Sustainable Manufacturing and Troubleshooting to help manufacturers boost process efficiency, improve sustainability outcomes, and reduce downtime.
The Process Efficiency Network is tailored to meet the needs of engineers, managers, and manufacturing professionals. It’s free to use at a basic level, with advanced tools available to license. Our technical tools are very simple to use and integrate well with existing systems. We invite manufacturing industry leaders who are searching for methods to improve operations to explore the Process Efficiency Network at https://processefficiency.net/ Whether you are seeking to optimize your processes, reduce waste, or need to troubleshoot a system issue, this cutting-edge digital platform will assist you in your drive for process efficiency improvement!
Submitted by: Tamara Czarnecki, President at PROCOR Technologies, Inc.
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