YS companies do the ‘green’ thing

Reggie Stratton, Carol Dieterick and Roberta Campbell as part of the Antioch Company’s “green team” meet regularly to strategize about how to make the business more environmentally responsible.

By Lauren Heaton

Harkening back to their socially-conscious roots at Antioch College, Yellow Springs’ two largest companies have spent the last decade thinking and becoming more green. The Antioch Company and YSI both subscribe to their industry standards for environmental accountability, which falls under the broad concept of corporate social responsibility, a measure of success not just in terms of profit but also in terms of environmental and social impact. In the last five years especially, both companies have made marked progress on the sustainability front.

The Antioch Company planted a prairie grass field around the perimeter of the facility on East Enon Road to reduce mowing and return some of the land to its native ecosystem. The company has also implemented several measures for the specified goal of reducing energy use to operate its machines and its building. YSI, Inc. has taken similar measures and now uses recycled packaging materials, has managed to cut by 2 percent the energy used to heat the building and incentivizes its employees to bike or drive energy-efficient cars to work.

Antioch Company goes green
When the Antioch Company renovated and expanded its original facility on East Enon Road in 2000, the company took the opportunity to implement energy-saving measures, according to Reggie Stratton, the facilities, safety and environmental manager for the Antioch Company’s Yellow Springs plant. Last year, in the interest of full disclosure, the company began triple bottom reporting to track environmental impact, fair labor practices, safety performance and diversity for its plants in Yellow Springs, Minnesota and Virginia.

According to internal data for just the local facility, the company has reduced its use of natural gas to cool and heat the 65,000 square-foot facility from 25,000 ccf last year to 23,000 ccf this year and increased its paper and aluminum recycling while cutting its landfill waste and water and sewage waste in half from 2005 to 2006.

Enlisting the help of a “green team,” that includes Stratton and Antioch Company employees Camille Lewis, Carol Dieterick, Robert Campbell and Dustin Wulfeck, the company has been able to make a wide range of changes in plant operations that have allowed them to not only save energy but also reduce or recoup production cost.

Recycling ink solvent, for instance, can produce quick paybacks for a company that produces printed paper products, according to Stratton. By purchasing a solvent recycling unit, the company was able to reduce its solvent waste from four barrels of hazardous waste per month to one barrel of non-hazardous sludge per month and now saves the company over $10,000 a year from reduced hazardous waste hauling and fresh solvent purchased, Stratton said. The move also brought the company into “small quantity exempt” status and eliminated the need to report on solid and liquid waste to the Environmental Protection Agency. (The company still reports on volatile organic compounds released into the air due to solvent use.)

Stratton evaluates waste streams in the delivery, sales and production departments for potential to recycle and encourages the purchase of recycled raw materials.

“By far we’re one of the leaders in recycling around here because we look at every waste stream,” Stratton said.

Recycling has saved the company about $60,000 per year, which The Antioch Company used to build a new fitness center for employees in 2001. The company was built on recycling paper from Antioch College to make bookplates, roots that have inspired Stratton to achieve a 70 percent recycled/30 percent landfill split in the company’s waste stream, and eventually get to a 90/10 split, he said.

As for the office space for the 50 employees near the main entry, the company installed T8 fluorescents on timers, while thermostats are programmed for weekday, night-time and weekend temperatures. And throughout the building in the fall and winter, heat from the air compressors and the offset press is recirculated back into the building.

On the production floor the company opened up its 30,000 square feet of space and installed fans to increase the efficient circulation of hot and cool air. The company also installed T5.5 fluorescents and converted 66 percent of its cleaning solutions to non-hazardous and biodegradable products by Johnson Diversey and manages to save 10 percent on janitorial purchases, Stratton said.

Part of Lewis’s role has been to research and install a rain garden that filters stormwater runoff from the rubber roof of the warehouse before it gets into area streams. The company also installed six rain barrels to use to water the gardens, and according to Stratton, the two football field sized prairies surrounding the facility have greatly reduced the mowing needed.

Stratton said that he became committed to improving the company’s environmental footprint after going through the company’s “Just Living” program, which offers employees awareness training on issues of social justice and community responsibility. Stratton has also been inspired by company leaders Lee Morgan and Greg Carlson, whose values are in line with sustainability, he said.

Stratton has attended renewable conferences and is investigating the possibility of using solar, wind and other renewables to power its facilities. If the company reaches a certain level of commitment to the environment, it could earn a LEED certification, Stratton said.

“But for us, it’s not really about getting the certification, it’s about doing the right thing,” he said.

The green standard at YSI
It was about a decade ago that YSI, Inc., under the leadership of company president Malte VonMatthiessen, saw the need to become environmentally sustainable and began to take steps to increase recycling and curb its energy use. According to Gerry Pitts, YSI’s environmental manager, the company started with the lower hanging fruit, such as office recycling and universal waste management for batteries and electronic equipment. But in 1999 just before ecological sustainability became one of the company’s four core values, YSI conformed to the environmental management standards of ISO 14001, later became a member of the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES), and established an ecological footprint team that in 2001 began producing an annual sustainability report through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

According to the performance track record reports, available online at http://sr.ysi.com/index.html, in 2001 YSI had switched from styrofoam to recyclable air bags for packing material and was recycling the equivalent of 24 trees in paper each year, but was not buying or using recycled materials. The company had restored one-third of an acre of land around the Brannum Lane facility to natural habitat but was using 13 million BTUs of energy each year to run the 170,000-square-foot Yellow Springs facility.

Through the efforts of its ecology team, by 2006 YSI had come a long way in a relatively short time period. According to the track record, that year, the company began using 100 percent post-consumer recycled cardboard and raised its annual use of recycled packaging from 2,000 pounds in 2003 to 33,000 pounds. And while the company’s restored habitat went up to one acre of prairie grass at the Brannum Lane campus, its energy use went down to 11 million BTUs a year after YSI installed a white roof on the manufacturing space and an automated heating, air conditioning and ventilating system for the building.

As a member of the EPA’s performance track record program, YSI establishes three to four new sustainability goals every couple of years, and for the 2007–2009 period, according to YSI’s corporate social responsibility director Lisa Abel, the company has begun to use energy conservation to guide its product design.

“Our CEO, Rick Omler, was interested in taking us to a new level, and this was his idea,” Abel said.

By working with its supply manufacturers, YSI aims to begin engineering instrument parts that use less energy to make and also to assemble. The company is also trying to design instruments that take less energy to operate in the field.

Other recent goals include continuing to reduce energy use at the facility, reduce volatile organic compound emissions, reduce the use of energy for travel and transport by offering employees incentives such as a credit for purchasing a hybrid car for daily commuting.

For a company that does business globally, YSI has had to commit to higher environmental standards, where in Europe for instance, industries are often held responsible for reclaiming products at the end of their life cycle, Pitts said. And while YSI has had to spend money to implement certain measures, after a certain period, conservation actually begins to save the company money, he said.

“We are where we are after 10 years in the effort,” he said.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com