Recycling pays dividends for company

Orion seeks to be green and clean at plant on Mirro Drive

MANITOWOC — Orion Energy Systems officials practice what they preach by recycling everything but the dirt.
Iron, steel, aluminum, copper, plastic, heat — even sunlight — are recycled, finding new life after processing in Orion's Mirro Drive manufacturing plant.

It just makes good business sense.

"Recycling is an attitude, and it also is profitable to take the money out of the garbage," said Don Heimerman, a product development specialist who oversees recycling in the plant as big as seven football fields.

Orion officials said its recycling department processes more than 95 percent of the materials used in manufacturing including cardboard, scrap aluminum and steel, wire, copper, plastics and other byproducts.

Earlier this year, Orion installed jet engine technology in the form of a micro-turbine to efficiently generate the electricity needed to operate its new powder paint coating system.

The heat produced by the turbine is channeled into a baking chamber and used to bake the powder paint onto the fixture.

Orion's fixtures use a highly reflective surface to "harvest" light emitted from all sides of a fluorescent tube and direct it downward. As a result, the fixtures typically give half again as much light at half- to two-thirds the operating cost compared to high intensity discharge sodium or metal halide lighting.

In the past eight years, Orion has deployed its patented high intensity fluorescent lighting system in 3,300 facilities in North America. Officials tout the energy savings as equivalent of taking 640,000 cars — and their exhaust — off the road.

Avoiding shipment to landfill

But Orion management and employees don't just sell environmentally friendly products.

"We keep green and keep clean ourselves," Heimerman said. "There is a place and a process for scrap produced on the line."

So-called "drop off" aluminum from Orion's own manufacturing goes through a smelting process at neighbor foundry Koenig & Vits or another vendor, returning to a usable form.

At the north end of the plant — which used to serve as distribution center for millions of pieces of Mirro cook and bakeware — Orion has six recycling technicians working full time.

Chad Reno stays busy getting the copper and steel out of electrical transformers for obsolete, high intensity discharge lighting brought to the Manitowoc plant from customers who purchased Orion's lighting system.
Reno said he likes the fact the transformers aren't simply getting shipped to a landfill.

"Any recycling program needs to not just be environmentally friendly but also cost-effective," Heimerman said, noting it makes fiscal sense to spend time collecting the copper, at nearly $3 per pound.

Neil Verfuerth, Orion's president and chief executive officer, said part of his company's customer service is to take away the old lighting fixtures.

The oversized cardboard containers used to ship Orion's new lights return the old fixtures from companies including SYSCO — which has Orion lighting in nearly 60 food processing plants nationwide — as well as Coca-Cola Enterprises and Ralph Lauren Polo.

"At Orion, we bridge the gap between environmental stewardship and capitalism … it's always about the money," Verfuerth said.

That means something as simple as recycling the thousands of free plastic bottles of water consumed each month by 140 employees at the plant, which opened in 2005.

Capturing sunlight

Some of them work in the south end of the plant where sunlight doesn't go to waste.

Orion sells the Apollo Light Pipe to customers. Placed on roofs, including Orion's, it collects and focuses daylight with a highly reflective, acrylic, geometric dome. It consumes no electricity, but the attached pipe transmits light to the plant interior.

In the time it took Verfuerth to give a visitor an early morning 45-minute tour, the sun rose high enough in the Lakeshore area sky to permit turning off the fluorescent lighting in that section of the plant.

"Rising energy prices and increasing environmental concerns are causing businesses to evaluate additional ways to become more energy efficient," Verfuerth said.

It's not just manufacturers who have seen the light, so to speak.

The Two Rivers School District has replaced 120 465-watt metal halide lamps with the same number of 6-tube, 121-watt Orion fixtures.

Orion officials estimate the school district will have about a 50 percent energy savings. They said reducing electrical power has environmental benefits.

Linda Diedrich, corporate communications director, said the local school district's energy reduction means that over the 20-year life of the new fixtures, 1,356 tons of carbon dioxide, 370 tons of carbon, 6 tons of sulfur dioxide and 3 tons of nitrous oxide — all greenhouse pollutant gases — will not enter the atmosphere.
The environmental benefits of Orion lighting were initiated at Jagemann Stamping, in Manitowoc's I-Tech Industrial Park, in 2005.

But, again, it is the financial savings associated with environmental stewardship that helped clinch the sale.
With a $76,000 investment, Industrial Engineering Director Matt Skorstad said the company is saving about $35,000 annually on electricity costs and another $12,000 in summer air conditioning cooling costs, as Orion lighting operates at a lower temperature.

Jagemann Stamping is on the recycling bandwagon, too, and its formal environmental management system is part of its ISO 14001 certification.

"We do a great deal of recycling, including oils, fluorescent (lights), and batteries," Skorstad said. "Our goal is to definitely get uses out of these materials rather than just filling landfills."

Online: www.oes.com & www.jagemann.com

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