Industrial Utility Efficiency

Corporate Sustainability Programs

Tetra Pak Solutions Conserve Water & Energy for Food & Beverage Sector

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

“Our view is always from the perspective of the value chain from the raw materials to the end product,” Wellendorph said. “How do we work with our suppliers who supply us? How do we look at our own manufacturing to avoid waste? Then, how can our equipment minimize the amount of energy or water it uses when processing and packaging customers products? It’s more than just focusing on ourselves.”

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John Deere Mows Down Energy Costs with Operating Discipline

By Jose Sarmiento Escalante, Facilities/Maintenance Engineer II, John Deere

Discover how John Deere achieved measurable energy savings without major capital investment by optimizing compressed air systems, implementing real-time monitoring and strengthening operational discipline. This case study demonstrates how equipment scheduling, defined ownership, predictive maintenance and data-driven verification reduced electrical demand by more than 1.15 million kWh annually while improving reliability and sustaining long-term manufacturing performance.
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20 Years of Case Studies: Plants Sharing Best Practices

Edited by Troy Dreier, Senior Editor, Compressed Air Best Practices® 

For 20 years, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine has published articles focused on helping manufacturers reduce power demand, lower water consumption, and improve the performance of compressed air, cooling, blower and industrial vacuum systems. In this article, we highlight a sampling of those stories across the following industries: Plastics and Packaging Food and Beverage Automotive and Transportation Cement, Building Materials, and Mining Metals, Pulp, and Paper Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, and Research Wastewater Treatment
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Sustainable Operations in Practice at Klöckner Pentaplast

By Roderick M. Smith, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

In most of our factories, we have installed detailed energy monitoring systems at multiple points along production lines, including air compressors, chillers and lights. These systems feed into a digital dashboard that displays energy consumption throughout the factory. For data visualisation, we use dashboards that aggregate data collected via SAP from production lines and allows us to visualise the data at a high level.
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Atlas Copco Compressors Enables Sustainability-Based Production

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

The U.S. air compressor market has a compressed air installed base of at least 15 million horsepower. Further, it evaluated various air audits across different customer types, sizes and segments and determined U.S. manufacturers stand to save around 13 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) annually in electricity associated with compressed air. That translates to a savings of $1 billion in energy costs per year, which would remove nine million metric tons of CO2 annually. That equates to more annual energy usage of more than 1 million homes in the United States.
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DOE Better Plants Partners Get Serious About Compressed Air Systems

By Robert Lung, BGS, with contributions from: Ed Willhite, Schneider Electric; Stephen Tankersley, Ring Containers; Marco Gonzalez, Waupaca Foundry; and Darwin Jaeger, Plastics Engineering Company.

Compressed air is used in all the company’s plants and is often the single largest energy end use within them. As a result, compressed air energy-saving measures are often replicable across the company and offer significant positive impacts. One area of focus is with compressed air leaks since they are “the best low hanging fruit to focus on and they always keep popping up and waste energy”.
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Continuing Education at the Best Practices 2021 EXPO & Conference

By Roderick Smith, Publisher, Best Practices Magazines and EXPO

The EXPO & Conference focuses on “Optimizing On-site Utilities Powering Automation.” Experts from all over the world convened to discuss compressed air, pneumatics, motors and drives, vacuum, aeration blower and chiller/cooling and water treatment systems. Held November 2-4, 2021, this 3rd installment of the event continued to provide continuing education, certification and networking opportunities to equipment sales engineers, engineering firm and manufacturing plant personnel.
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Sustainability Pillars at Intertape Polymer Group Inc.

By Roderick M. Smith, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

In February 2021, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine interviewed members of the Intertape Polymer Group Inc. (IPG) Sustainability Pillars team to gain an understanding of the work being done to improve energy efficiency. The team members interviewed were Michael Jones (Director of Corporate Energy), Michael Deitering (Senior Project Engineer), Jarrod Knapp (Maintenance Manager) and Mark Secord (Engineering Group Leader).
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CalPortland® Continues to Walk the Walk in Sustainability

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

A major producer of cement and building materials, CalPortland’s energy management efforts have reduced the company’s overall energy intensity by 17.5% since 2003, avoiding $149 million in unnecessary energy costs – and over 3.3 million metric tons of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. In 2020, the company achieved what no other U.S. Industrial company has: It earned the ENERGY STAR® Partner of the Year Award for the 16th consecutive year.
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Ford Motor Company’s Kentucky Truck Plant Helps Paint a Bright Energy Future

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

The Ford Motor Company Kentucky Truck Plant (KTP) not only manufactures upscale SUVs and pickup trucks painted in wide variety of stellar, high-quality colors and finishes – it does so cost-effectively by conserving annual compressed air energy of approximately 9.2 GWh thanks to a major overhaul of the plant’s compressed air system.
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Food & Beverage Ingredients Firm Tate & Lyle On a Mission to Protect the Planet

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

Tate & Lyle’s sustainability actions involve countless initiatives worldwide to minimize its environmental impact by reducing emissions and using water sustainably. Whether it’s the use of a low-pressure blower instead of a high-pressure compressed air system to save energy, or a $75 million natural gas-fired Combined Heat and Power (CHP) system to replace coal as a power source at its corn wet mill in Lafayette, Indiana, Tate & Lyle is on a mission to protect the planet.
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Saint-Gobain Makes Solving Sustainability Competitive and Fun

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

Challenging teams of employees to generate energy savings while having a good time in the process is the idea behind Saint-Gobain’s “Compress It,” which is the name given to the company’s competition and ongoing effort to reduce compressed air energy and costs. The initiative, which Saint-Gobain rolled out to manufacturing plants throughout North America in 2018, has been met with success. Compress It identified potential energy savings amounting to 26 Gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity and $2.5 million.
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TE Connectivity’s Focus on ROI Drives Sustainability Success and Compressed Air Savings

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

The company is succeeding with sustainability at many operations, including its manufacturing plant in Lickdale, Pennsylvania. In fall 2019, officials from the Department of Energy’s Better Plants program joined company officials there to celebrate the plant’s energy achievements – including an 11% reduction in compressed air energy costs. Its ability to reduce the cost of compressed air to the tune of $223,000 per year is a prime example how many TE Connectivity operations have fully embraced sustainability.
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IUE-CWA Labor Union Members Embrace Energy Treasure Hunts

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

Manufacturers familiar with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ENERGY STAR® Energy Treasure Hunts initiative know it’s a great way to save energy and natural resources – as long as it’s done right – which is why some are turning to perhaps their best asset to achieve success: their unionized workforce.
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Sustainability is “Part of Who We Are” at Eastman

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

By making sustainability a requirement and a core element of its growth strategy, Eastman has improved the energy efficiency of manufacturing operations by 13% since its baseline year of 2008 (the year Eastman became an ENERGY STAR® Partner). By 2018, Eastman had decreased its greenhouse gas intensity by 20%, two years ahead of its goal. Additionally, Eastman received the 2019 ENERGY STAR® Partner of the Year Award for Sustained Excellence, marking the company’s eighth consecutive ENERGY STAR award: two years as Partner of the Year and six years of Sustained Excellence recognition.
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Better Plants® Partners Get a Leg up in the Battle for Energy and Water Efficiency

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

In 2019, more than 230 Better Plants partners took advantage of the program to gain considerable ground in their sustainability efforts. In so doing, they cumulatively saved more than $6.7 billion in energy costs and more than 1.3 quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTUs). These same companies have more than 3,200 facilities and represent approximately 12% of the U.S. manufacturing energy footprint. In addition to energy, partners are excelling at projects to improve water efficiency.
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Stanley Black & Decker Plant in Tennessee: A Beacon of Sustainability

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

New Britain, Connecticut-based Stanley Black & Decker has gained widespread recognition for its commitment to social responsibility and sustainability – and with good reason: The company has reduced CO2 emissions in 2018 by 8,840 metric tons and in 2019 it was on track to further reduce greenhouse CO2 emissions by another 4,000 metric tons.
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Culture Building with ENERGY STAR® Energy Treasure Hunts

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

There are many reasons why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ENERGY STAR® Energy Treasure Hunts have proven successful in helping companies save energy and natural resources, but one that rises to the top is their ability to build a culture of energy efficiency throughout an organization.
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A Strategic Approach to Efficient and Reliable Compressed Air Systems

By Kurt A. Kniss, P.E., C.E.M., former Innovation Engineer with the Equipment and Process Innovation Group at Shaw Industries, Inc.Shaw Industries, Inc.

As a corporate engineer responsible for supporting operations, I write this article from the perspective of the plant/maintenance engineer who is responsible for the on-line operation of the compressed air system. This article can also help suppliers of compressed air systems gain some understanding of how their customers prioritize plant operations.
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Shining the Spotlight on Manufacturing Sustainability in Tennessee

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

“What really drives the TGSP program is that we celebrate how manufacturers throughout the state of Tennessee do more than anything the EPA or TDEC ask them to do as far as regulations,” said Glapa. “We have 7,000 manufacturers in Tennessee who can benefit from hearing and learning about these efforts. The idea behind TGSP is to give manufacturers who are environmental leaders a place to shine.”
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How has 3M Canada Cut Energy Use by 32%?

By Anatoli Naoumov, Managing Director, GreenQ Partners

How does 3M work with energy? What can other companies learn from their experience? I brought these questions to Andrew Hejnar, Energy Manager of 3M Canada, and the results of our conversation are shared in this interview article.
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Compressed Air is a Star at Ball Corporation

By Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

Paying close attention to compressed air use is paramount for identifying potential energy-saving projects. The engineering team at Ball Corporation has been well aware of this fact for years. An active member in the Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR® program, Ball Corporation scrutinizes manufacturing processes to maximize the energy efficiency of compressed air systems in each of its plants.
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Energy Management Considerations with Today’s Drive Systems

by Michael Perlman, Marketing Programs Manager, Siemens Industry

While it is valid to state that energy efficiency is defined as the same level of production being achieved at an overall lower energy cost, it is equally important for today’s machine builders and automation engineers alike to remember than an energy-efficient system can actually translate into higher productivity. This is achievable through a comprehensive approach to energy management.
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Don’t Skip the Most Important Meeting of Your Energy Project

By John Molnar, Rogers Machinery Company

In many parts of the country—and especially the Pacific Northwest—interest has surged in completing energy-saving compressed air system upgrades. The financial assistance from incentive programs, combined with the falling costs of efficiency-increasing technology, has made these projects very attractive to all those involved. The benefits for society, power companies and customers are immense.
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