AUTOMAKERS
Auto plants embracing cost-saving moves
Ford Motor Co.’s stamping plant in Hamburg has a huge system for saving energy on its exterior, but you might not even notice it.
Part of the outside of the Route 5 facility consists of a “Solarwall,” a system that uses solar power to heat air for use inside the plant. The system was installed by Conserval Engineering in 1988, long before the “green” movement gained mainstream appeal in the United States.
The 50,000 square feet of solar panels heat incoming ventilation air that is moved through the plant via ducts.
Ford has retrofitted a number of its facilities with the Solarwall system, said Victoria Hollick, Conserval’s vice president of operations. The Hamburg site was among the first and recovered its installment cost within three years.
“They understood the benefits that corporations could reap” by changing the way their plants are heated, Hollick said. (When the heating season is over, the solar-heating system is bypassed.)
The U. S. automakers are under pressure to dramatically improve their performance. Part of that involves cutting costs and running as lean as possible to keep their operations viable.
When the Solarwall was first installed at the Hamburg plant, it was estimated the system generated about $150,000 a year in savings on heating expenses. Hollick estimates that the savings is now about $300,000 annually. Conserval, which has offices in Amherst, Toronto and France, has installed the systems around the world.
Ford’s Hamburg site also has switched to fluorescent lighting inside the plant, said David Buzo, the plant manager.
“It really brightened the plant floor,” he said. Not only does that type of lighting reduce energy costs, he said, but data show that that a brighter work place also improves the mind-set of the employees.
General Motors’ Town of Tonawanda engine plant was ahead of the corporate curve in 2006 when it earned “landfill free” status, only the second GM plant to do so. GM now wants half of its major global manufacturing operations to earn that status by the end of 2010. A plant receives the designation when all production waste or garbage is either recycled or reused.
At GM’s Tonawanda plant, about 97 percent of the waste materials generated through production are recycled, and about 3 percent of its waste is converted to energy at waste-to-energy facilities, said Casey Essary, an environmental engineer.
Some green efforts have spread around the complex, Essary said. For instance, GM had focused on paper recycling in its administrative areas. Then United Auto Workers members noted paper reports were being put out in some parts of the manufacturing floor almost daily and could be recycled as well, he said.
“They see the benefit of it,” Essary said.
Those types of projects enhance the company’s “green image” and keep more material out of landfills, he said. “It’s also good for the community.”
GM Tonawanda is also trying to reduce the amount of electricity, natural gas and water consumed in the 3 million square foot complex, said Gary Londo, facility manager.
As of mid-December, it had reduced its energy usage in 2008 by 20 percent, Londo said. Its target for this year is to cut energy use by 14 percent.
The operating temperature in the plant has been lowered to 66 degrees, from 72-to-74 degrees previously. (The temperature at the start of a shift is 68 degrees, and then is gradually lowered as employees start moving around.)
The plant has also adopted a practice under which the last person out of a work area following a shift is responsible for shutting down equipment and lights. That person can look at a Web site with up-to-date data on whether the energy-savings target has been hit, Londo said.
One related challenge: getting all of that power-hungry equipment up and running again quickly at the start of the next shift, so that engine production is not delayed.
The Tonawanda plant was rated No. 4 in energy savings among GM’s North American plants during the Thanksgiving shutdown, not an easy task given the older age of much of the River Road complex, Londo said.
Sometimes an auto industry plant’s green efforts win outside recognition. In the Town of Lockport, Delphi Corp.’s plant stopped using a certain type of anti-corrosion coating on auto parts. Regulation and customer requirements mandated elimination of the coating’s use in 2007 in keeping with European legislation.
As a result of the change, the Upper Mountain Road plant was able to close a wastewater treatment plant, a move that conserved water, electricity and natural gas. It also eliminated 1.1 million pounds of treatment chemicals per year and 200 tons of hazardous waste disposal, according to Delphi.
For its changes, the plant received a 2007 Environmental Excellence Award from the state Department of Environmental Conservation, one of six such honors handed out by the agency.
Delphi said a number of parties collaborated to make the changes a reality, including product, manufacturing and environmental engineers and personnel from Delphi’s quality and manufacturing operations.
Hazardous waste other than wastewater generated by the Delphi plant has fallen by almost 84 percent from 1999 to 2007, the company said. And for 2008, the plant was on pace to reduce utility consumption of steam by 30 percent, municipal water by 22 percent, electricity by 18 percent and natural gas by 8 percent.
Essary, from the GM engine plant, could be speaking for all the facilities when he talked about efforts to recycle even more material.
“There’s always new technologies and new processes coming out,” he said.
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