Earth Day, Every Day  In recognition of Earth Day 2009, this is our third and final story in a series we published throughout the month of April. Read our previous two stories — Barley Bricks and Homes and Powered by Sawdust — for other examples of Earth Day behavior year round.

Behavior-based energy management at one Cargill plant
is saving $42,000 a week or $2 million a year in utility costs.

At a Cargill pork processing plant in the U.S., workers are turning off the lights, fixing leaky steam pipes faster and making sure water hoses aren’t allowed to trickle. These are just a few of many “behavior modifications” that are adding up to cost savings of $42,000 a week in utility costs or $2 million annually.

Cargill’s corporate environmental manager, Greg Jason, is hopeful that behavior-based energy management, like behavior-based safety before it, can spread across the world of Cargill — especially among the 100 biggest plants. “We already excel at energy-saving technology,” explains Jason. “Now, we have an opportunity to expand our focus onto people and processes.”

Helping the company recognize where savings can be made is Management Alternatives, Ltd. (MAL), a consulting company that specializes in helping plants achieve energy reduction by focusing on people, their behaviors and the company’s culture. MAL has already helped several other Cargill plants achieve significant savings through the same program.

Serious savings

MAL’s representative at the pork processing plant is Dave Morningstar, who prowls about the plant asking questions like, “Why do you run three boilers when you can get enough power from two?” Or, “Why are you heating up fresh water here when you have water over there that is already hot?”

As Morningstar moves through the plant, he whips out a tiny hand-held fan to check air flow in the space he happens to be in. “The processing of animals is done in cold temperatures to keep the meat fresh,” he explains. “You can’t compromise on that, but you can minimize the mixing of cool air with warm air. You can make sure the air is flowing the right way.”

Working shoulder to shoulder, Cargill and MAL found a wide range of savings throughout the plant, including:

• Savings of $30,000 annually by changing air conditioning patterns in just one area of the plant
• Savings of $750 per day in boiler power costs by simply improving the communication between the boiler operators and the main processing areas
• Savings of 80,000 gallons of water per day by reengineering how the plant maintains a fresh water supply for its pigs — without affecting their living conditions
• More savings will be found by finding and fixing leaks in the miles of pipes that snake through the plant. At another Cargill facility, for instance, managers were able to save approximately $500,000 in unwasted steam by plugging 200 leaks

If some of the actions described here sound simple, well, many of them are. Talk to just about anyone about behavior-based energy management and sooner or later the phrase, “It’s not rocket science” will come out of their mouths. 

Once the opportunities were pointed out, they seemed obvious. But it took someone to point them out, and it took a team of dedicated individuals to deal with them. Then, it becomes behavior.